By that, I mean when an old and dormant franchise tries to reboot itself (often, again) and even if the new film (or show) has some success, it's largely forgotten over time compared to what it was intended to be rebooting.
It's actually hard for me to narrow down on a few specific examples of the lost-to-obscurity outright failed reboots, but did you know Rollerball (the 70s movie) had a post-2000s reboot? That's one example.
Disney has a habit of making live-action reboots of old animated films they gave a dull "reality" treatment to and most of them are already forgotten compared to the cartoons they came from.
Spider-Man's been rebooted so many times they made a movie about the rebooting! The "middle children" of those reboots seem to only exist as footnotes already.
No one seems to have asked for Scooby Doo's latest reboot (which is just an edgy nepo baby that removed Scooby Doo from Scooby Doo and wanted to turn Velma into a personal avatar) and while suits keep it going for now, it's not likely to be remembered either.
I even saw this happen with Prometheus and its sequel, which were not quite reboots but did retcon a lot of known lore, such as the outright stupid "real" origin of the Xenomorphs and the fate of the Space Jockeys that was so forgettable that I don't even remember its name. Alien(s) is still discussed, and those are not so much.
Similar deal with the Star Wars Disney Trilogy, which while technically not reboots functionally were because Abrams doesn't play well with other people's toys and had to kill/blow up most things that had been built up before he showed up so his "soft reboot" could happen. Come to think of it, the 2009 Trek film series had a similar issue.
Is there anything out there to discuss this "new and shiny and maybe even profitable reboot fades into irrelevance" phenomenon?
We've moved past the idea of Genre Fiction, because all the IP is horded by a handful of ultra-influential studios that need to justify their giant back catalogue with Extended Universe stuff. So instead of getting Star Trek and Star Wars and The Last Starfighter and Flash Gordon and Heavy Metal and Aliens and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, we just get a thousand derivative iterations of the two or three most successful franchises from 40 years ago.
I think we're stuck here until we get a resurgence of smaller indie studios, with the capacity to film and produce content that engages people on the scale of the old 80s material. Foreign films, streaming services, and Patreon/Kickstarter/IndieGoGo type fundraising services definitely have the seeds of future original content. But because of the financialization of the film industry and the fact that these producers tend to operate outside the scope of the traditional western finance means they can't grow at the speed and scale of a Lucas Films or Sony or Marvel.
Market saturation and consolidation is really restricting the quality and breadth of content. And established IP has the advantage of being cheap to produce and relatively uncontroversial to legally distribute in an age of patient/IP trolling. That's a big bottleneck, in the US at least. But maybe we can get a Bollywood or Beijingwood or even a Moscow-wood industry that can produce content outside of these constraints.
By that, I mean when an old and dormant franchise tries to reboot itself (often, again) and even if the new film (or show) has some success, it's largely forgotten over time compared to what it was intended to be rebooting.
So like how Tom and Jerry/Looney Tunes cartoons are still being made, but people still only care about the originals?
I think there's stuff on the 20 year cycle, although maybe the phenomenon of the failed reboot is too modern (relatively speaking) for academia?
The Rollerball reboot was like this super interesting forbidden fruit for me because I was too young to watch it when I was a kid but my older brother had the DVD. So I would like sneak looks at it through his door when he watched it. That combined with it being the most violent thing I had seen up until that point, it became this weird super memorable thing of my childhood lol
Edit - because of that I didn’t even know it was a reboot until now lmao that’s interesting. I always thought it was just a strange, really bad 2000s movie among thousands
The 70s Rollerball was actually quite memorable... but also chilling.
No one seems to have asked for Scooby Doo's latest reboot (which is just an edgy nepo baby that removed Scooby Doo from Scooby Doo and wanted to turn Velma into a personal avatar) and while suits keep it going for now, it's not likely to be remembered either.
Should I watch Velma?
Is there anything out there to discuss this "new and shiny and maybe even profitable reboot fades into irrelevance" phenomenon?
I don't think these reboots are really any more quickly forgotten than your average movie release.
