The 3D fad has passed, and remakes aren’t as populous as they once were.
This is the age of the reboot.
Star Wars. X-Files. Peanuts. Twin Peaks. Crash Bandicoot. Full House. Ghostbusters. The Muppets. Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Reading Rainbow.
It’s an exciting period for anyone in love with pop-culture’s past, and big business for the companies that have the rights to the respective series. Just look at Star Wars: The Force Awakens, now the third-highest grossing film of all time (ignoring inflation), having made just over $2 billion worldwide. Did audiences like it? It doesn’t matter!
But what is driving the re-emergence of these once-great franchises? Is it a flood of great new ideas, or a lack of them?
Experts feel that the entertainment industry is in a mode of forced cultural stagnation, thanks to digital advances that have made nostalgic content easier to access, and executives who are focusing on the bottom line instead of the original script ideas piling up on their desk.
When earlier this decade, Nickelodeon started showing repeats of 90s children shows after midnight, they saw an 850% increase in viewership for the time slot. The decision to screen the shows was a direct result of people sharing images and clips of the various series across social media and Youtube. The channel pandered to nostalgia, and proved it was big business.
Reboots were an inevitable evolution of this practice, but while Nickelodeon targeted the 18-34 demographic, the industry as a whole are looking at an older market. This is especially true on television, which has received an unprecedented boost in viewership over the last few years thanks to premium and VOD content.
So far, the trend has had both highs and lows. The premiere of the new season of The X-Files, which launched in late-January 2016, saw a higher viewership than the average it received during its most popular season. Meanwhile, Minority Report – the television show based on Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel – is almost certain to be cancelled after Fox decided to order 10 episodes instead of the expected 13.
Where the question of a reboot’s value has really come into play though, is on crowdfunding platforms. In 2014, actor LeVar Burton successfully raised nearly $5.5 million (as well as an extra $1 million from Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane) to reboot Reading Rainbow, an educational program he had hosted for 23 years before it was cancelled in 2006. This was followed by a campaign to bring back Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a cult TV show that ‘riffed’ on bad films. It ended as the most successful Film & Television campaign on Kickstarter, after raising a total of $6.3 million.
Where once the best way to profit off previous work had been attending fan conventions, now fellow producers of pop-culture past have a way to keep creating, often without having to worry about studios or network executives tinkering with their vision.
So is the reboot just another trend, or will revitalising old content to satiate the appetites of the nostalgic become part of the norm? Is it a step backwards, or a leap forward in the evolution of an industry that’s become less about the craft, and more about the saleability?
If the next nine years of planned Star Wars films are anything to go off, I’d say the future belongs to the past.
How do you feel about the rise of the reboot? Let us know in the comments below.