Movies & TV3w ago · 73 comments
Are remakes and reboots killing creativity, or keeping classics alive?
Hollywood's out of ideas — or smartly introducing greats to a new generation? Lazy cash grab, or cultural preservation?
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Add your comment- Maya3w ago
The real question nobody's asking: why do we keep remaking movies that were already PERFECT? Remake bad movies with good concepts. There are dozens of films from the 70s and 80s with brilliant premises that were just executed terribly. THAT'S the goldmine studios are sitting on and ignoring.
- Leo1w ago
I'm a screenwriter. Have been for twelve years. The number of original pitches I've had passed on because 'there's no built-in audience' would make you sick. Not bad scripts. Good ones. The IP obsession isn't a theory, it's a daily reality for people trying to actually make things.
- Elena2w ago
My daughter has autism and she watches the same movies on repeat as a comfort mechanism. When her favourite was remade, she got a whole new version of the same story she loves. I honestly cried. I know that's not the big creative debate but for some of us these properties are lifelines not just entertainment.
- Elena2w ago
this comment deserves more engagement than it's getting. the utilitarian case for remakes is real and it doesn't get discussed enough because film discourse is dominated by critics who see movies as art objects rather than experiences people live inside of
- Omar2w ago
I appreciate the sentiment genuinely, but I think the existence of remakes and their emotional value to some people is being used here to deflect from the systemic question, which is what happens to the ecosystem when risk-averse IP recycling is the dominant studio strategy. These aren't mutually exclusive issues.
- Yuki2w ago
I'll defend remakes when they DO something. The Thing (1982) is technically a remake and it's one of the greatest horror films ever made. The Fly remake is BETTER than the original. Ocean's Eleven. Scarface. True Grit. Ben-Hur (1959). These exist. The problem isn't the concept of remaking — it's the execution, always the execution.
- Maya2w ago
This is why context matters so much. People are shocked to discover their 'original' was itself a reworking of something older. The whole discourse collapses a little when you realize it.
- Jordan1w ago
Here's where I actually land after thinking about this too long: remakes aren't killing creativity. The death of the mid-budget original film is killing creativity. The stuff that used to live between blockbusters and arthouse — thrillers, comedies, dramas with actual budgets — that's gone. And reboots didn't kill it, streaming economics did. We're blaming the symptom.
- Drew2w ago
The Lion King remake had ZERO reason to exist. They took one of the most visually expressive animated films ever made, with characters whose faces could do anything, and turned it into photorealistic animals that can't emote. They literally removed the art form to make it look more 'real'. That's not preservation. That's vandalism.
- Leo3w ago
worked in development at a mid-size studio for six years. the number of genuinely original scripts that got passed over because a VP couldn't say 'it's like X but with Y' in a pitch meeting would make you weep. the system selects against creativity structurally. it's not laziness, it's incentive design.
- Iris1w ago
The Lion King remake made $1.6 billion. That movie was a shot-for-shot copy with worse expressions. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the current state of Hollywood, I don't know what will.
- Feli M.1w ago
"indie film is thriving" my brother in christ the average indie film gets 4,000 views on a streaming platform before being quietly deleted from the library. distribution is the crisis, not production. nobody can see the creative work that exists.
- Avery3w ago
Took my kid to a reboot and watched her fall in love with a world I loved at her age. Snob all you want, that moment was real.
- Iris M.2d ago
hot take: the audience is as much to blame as the studios. we say we want original films and then we don't show up for them. Babylon bombed. The Northman bombed. Nope underperformed. Every year original ambitious films fail at the box office while we're all watching another IP sequel. studios follow incentives. we set the incentives.
- Nina 214d ago
The thing that actually breaks my heart is animated sequels to films that had perfect endings. Some stories end. The ending is part of what makes them sacred. Ripping that open twenty years later to sell more merch is genuinely a kind of vandalism and I will not be taking questions.
- Feli1w ago
Those older remakes you're listing usually came with a genuine artistic vision attached — a specific director with a specific reason to revisit the material. Today's remakes come with a specific FISCAL QUARTER attached. That's the actual difference and pretending otherwise is naive.
- Jamie1w ago
I worked at a video store for years before streaming killed the industry. The films that customers kept renting over and over — the ones people genuinely loved — were almost never remakes. They were weird originals. Labyrinth. Big Trouble in Little China. They Might Be Giants. The stuff studios would never greenlight today. That's what the ecosystem is losing.
- Omar L.1w ago
Folk songs evolved organically through generations and changed with communities. A corporate IP being exploited for quarterly earnings is not the same process and calling it the same thing is genuinely misleading.
- Elena1w ago
studios greenlight 40 sequels and remakes and then wonder why audiences are 'burned out' on movies. you built the fire. you can't act surprised that it burned something down.
- Feli 921w ago
Audiences keep going though. Furious 11 will make a billion dollars. Audiences vote with tickets and they keep voting for this. At some point personal responsibility for consumption has to enter the conversation.
- Jordan1w ago
Blaming audiences for responding to the only widely-marketed options available is like blaming someone for eating fast food when there's no grocery store in their town. Studios control what gets marketing budgets. That shapes demand. This isn't hard.
- Priya1w ago
there are grocery stores though. a24 exists. mubi exists. criterion is right there. the argument that original cinema is inaccessible is increasingly hard to make in the streaming era
- Jamie1w ago
A24 releases maybe 15-20 films a year. Disney releases that many sequels alone. Scale matters when you're talking about what shapes culture broadly vs. what serves film enthusiasts specifically.
- Yuki4d ago
Grew up in a country where American films arrived years late and only the popular ones got distributed at all. When a remake came out it was often the ONLY version of that story I'd ever have access to. The original-vs-remake hierarchy is very much a first-world problem rooted in assuming everyone has equal access to film history. We don't.
- Marco2d ago
My gran has macular degeneration and can't read subtitles easily. She loves the English-language remakes of foreign films because they're the only way she can access those stories. You want to tell her that's a cultural failure? To her face? Go ahead.
- Priya1w ago
Can we talk about how TV reboots are actually more interesting than film reboots on average? The Battlestar Galactica reboot fundamentally transformed and improved on the source material. Twin Peaks: The Return was some of the most adventurous television ever made. The longer format allows for actual reinvention rather than just reskinning.
- Leo T.1w ago
The BSG reboot was genuinely one of the most ambitious things American television had done up to that point. Added political complexity the original didn't remotely have. Used the IP as a starting point and then just... made something new. That should be the model.
- Taylor1w ago
Twin Peaks: The Return is literally David Lynch using network nostalgia funding to make the most uncommercial thing imaginable. It's like he weaponized the reboot format against itself. Pure genius.
- Taylor1w ago
They remade Point Break in 2015. The original was from 1991. Who was this for? Who sat in a meeting and thought: yes, this is the movie that needs to exist. I want to have been in that room.
- Sam3w ago
Counterpoint: La La Land was original. Get Out was original. Everything Everywhere All At Once was original. Parasite won best picture. The originals that deserve to survive ARE surviving. Stop using reboots as a scapegoat for your frustration that audiences choose what they choose.
- Leo1w ago
Dune isn't a reboot though??? It's an adaptation of a book. The 1984 Lynch version was also an adaptation. Neither one is a remake of the other. These categories matter and conflating them muddies the whole argument.
- Elena4d ago
I asked my nephew what his favorite movie was and he said it was the new Top Gun. So I showed him the original. He said it was 'kinda boring.' And you know what? He's not wrong. Maverick is objectively a better structured film. Sometimes the remake wins. We should be okay admitting that.
- Theo1w ago
ok but has anyone considered that some originals were just... not that good? like the 1984 Footloose is a deeply mediocre film that people only love because they were 14 when they saw it. nostalgia is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in these conversations
- Noah R.1w ago
Counterpoint nobody wants to hear: some originals are overrated precisely BECAUSE they were never touched again. The mystique IS the legacy. Remake it and suddenly people have to reckon with how thin the original actually was.
- Theo1w ago
the thing that actually kills me is the TIMING. we're remaking things from the 90s now. stuff that doesn't need remaking, stuff people in their 30s and 40s have vivid memories of. at least wait until the original is genuinely inaccessible to mainstream audiences
- Liam4d ago
culture shapes memory and meaning though. when a beloved thing gets a bad sequel, you can't always cleanly separate them in your head. ask anyone who watched the How I Met Your Mother finale. the ending retroactively damages what came before in real psychological ways. the original being 'technically still there' isnt the whole story
- Leo2w ago
Here's my hot take that will upset everyone: international remakes are PROOF the system can work. Oldboy got an American version, Ringu became The Ring, Funny Games got remade by the same director in English because he wanted it to reach American audiences who wouldn't watch subtitles. Localization is a real creative and cultural service.
- Quinn2w ago
The Ring is genuinely a case where the American remake is better than the original for American audiences. There I said it. Come at me.
- Noah2w ago
You said it wrong. Both are great in different ways and that's the actual interesting conversation. Why does the American version hit differently? What cultural anxieties did Verbinski tap into? That analysis matters. Ranking them is boring.
- Diego2d ago
The taxonomy DOES matter because remake vs sequel vs reboot vs adaptation vs reimagining all involve completely different creative and ethical considerations. Lumping them together lets studios off the hook for the specific thing each type of project is doing or failing to do.
- Ravi3w ago
It's not preservation, the originals still EXIST. A remake doesn't 'save' a classic, it just buries a risky new idea that could've been someone's new favorite.
- Diego M.6d ago
What gets me is the CONFIDENCE of the remakes. Like the Ghostbusters reboot didn't say 'here's a new angle on this.' It said 'here is Ghostbusters again.' No humility, no curiosity. Just assumption that the brand alone is enough. And honestly for ticket sales? It often is. That's the depressing part.
- Zara2w ago
Every Shakespeare play is a remake. Every opera is based on something else. Virgil rewrote Homer. This hysteria about remakes is so historically illiterate it physically pains me.
- Maya2w ago
I'm a film studies lecturer and I want to push back on this 'everything is a remake' argument a little. There's a meaningful difference between an artist drawing from mythology to create something new and a corporation reverse-engineering an IP's profit margin. Intent and execution matter enormously here. The process looks similar from outside but the products are categorically different.
- Nina M.2w ago
That's... actually a genuinely good point and I hate that I have to acknowledge it
- Ravi B.1d ago
There's also a generational power thing happening here that nobody names. The people greenlighting remakes are in their 50s and 60s. They're greenlighting their own childhoods. The system isn't broken — it's working exactly as designed by people who get to make the calls and have chosen to use that power to loop back to their own formative years. New generations will get their turn eventually. This is what 'their turn' looks like.
- Jordan2w ago
My 8-year-old nephew has never seen the original Ghostbusters. He watched Afterlife and now he's obsessed. He found the original himself. I didn't push him. The remake led him there naturally. Sometimes the gateway drug IS the point.
- Omar2w ago
okay but what if the gateway drug just replaces the original in his mind forever and he never feels the need to go deeper? that happens too. ive met plenty of people who watched the 2011 footloose and thought they'd 'seen footloose'
- Priya2w ago
The Footloose comparison is hilarious because who exactly is suffering here? A teenager didn't watch the 1984 version? This is the hill we're dying on?
- Noah2w ago
Nobody is 'dying on a hill' we're having a conversation about creative culture which has actual downstream effects on what kinds of stories get funded and told. The dismissiveness in this thread is really something.
- Drew 924d ago
The real villain isn't remakes. It's test screening culture. Every film — original or remake — gets sanded down by focus groups until all the weird edges are gone. The problem isn't the source material. It's that the whole machine is optimized against surprise.
- Liam R.1w ago
Nostalgia is a completely legitimate cultural force and I'm tired of it being treated as lesser. Connecting generations through shared stories isn't 'lazy'. It's what culture has ALWAYS done. Your grandparents sang the same folk songs their grandparents sang. We watch remakes of things our parents loved. This is normal human behaviour.
- Drew1w ago
The Magnificent Seven is a remake of Seven Samurai. The Thing is a remake. Scarface. His Girl Friday. Heat drew from an earlier TV movie. Literally every film scholar will tell you this conversation has been happening since the 1930s. Acting like this is a new crisis is historically illiterate.
- Jordan L.2d ago
I don't accept this framing. Marketing budgets are a factor too. Original films don't get the press junkets, the merchandise deals, the tie-in promotions. Of course they underperform — they're being set up to underperform. It's not a free market.
- Noah2d ago
nobody is arguing remakes should literally not exist. the argument is about proportion and creative ecosystem. one thing can serve a genuine purpose and also be systematically overproduced to the point of crowding out alternatives. both things true.
- Marco5d ago
I genuinely think the conversation about reboots is a proxy war for a much bigger anxiety about whether mass culture can still produce meaning, or whether it's just going to loop forever feeding us processed versions of things that already moved us. And that's a scarier question than anyone wants to sit with.
- Yuki 213d ago
Top Gun Maverick is not a remake it's a sequel. I'm begging people to learn what words mean before they use them in arguments about film.
- Sam1d ago
I'll say what no one else will: sometimes the original was made in a different cultural moment and the remake is actually an improvement specifically because the world has changed. Not every classic aged well. Some of them aged really, really badly. A sensitive reimagining that fixes that isn't betrayal, it's maturity.
- Maya4d ago
Vandalism. VANDALISM. You understand nobody is destroying the original film, correct? It still exists. You can still watch it. The ending is still there. Describing voluntary commercial entertainment as vandalism is the most dramatic thing I have read this week and I read a lot of dramatic things.
- Diego L.2d ago
spent my whole career in TV development and I promise you the 'creative death' discourse is overstated. for every lazy franchise cash-in there's a Severance, a White Lotus, a Succession. the peak TV era has produced some of the best writing in American cultural history. it's not a golden age for cinema specifically, maybe, but creativity isn't dead
- Casey1w ago
my daughter literally refused to watch anything that wasn't animated until she saw the new Dune. now she's 16 and obsessed with Denis Villeneuve's whole filmography. tell me again how reboots and adaptations are ruining cinema
- Maya K.2w ago
both sides of this debate are being dramatic lol. its just movies. some remakes good, some bad. same with originals. the lion king remake was mid, the batman was great. case by case basis people
- Feli2d ago
this is the real answer. creativity migrated from theatrical cinema to prestige television and everyone's too busy mourning the movies to notice how good the TV got
- Zara4d ago
this is such a good point that keeps getting ignored in this debate. preservation and access are real concerns, especially for audiences outside the US and Western Europe
- Casey3d ago
nobody cares about your semantic taxonomy, the broader point about sequels and revisits stands
- Diego T.3w ago
Every 'original classic' you're defending was a remake of a play, a myth, or a book. Pure originality is a myth we invented recently.
- Taylor K.1w ago
nope hard disagree with all of this. creativity is fine. indie film is thriving. you're just looking in the wrong place
- Riley3w ago
Follow the money: remakes are safe bets for studios scared of losing a billion. It's not a creative choice, it's an accounting one, and it's strangling everything else.
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