Movie Reboots Are Just Respecs

After reading a few threads about all the movie reboots that are in the works at the moment I had a thought; they're all just respecs. Bear with me here.

You want to make a new character, so you decide on a name, a back-story, work out the archetype, powersets, the core powers you need to include. Then you go to work on the details, the costume, the pool powers, the enhancements.

You put a lot of time, effort & "money" into building your character up until finally you unleash them upon the world, eagerly awaiting the inevitable success and adulation. But it's soon obvious that something isn't quite right; it's just not as good as you expected, people don't respond well to them, success remains tantalizingly out of reach and so, reluctantly, you chalk it all up to experience and put them away into storage.

Then, months later, while searching for something new to play, your gaze falls upon your old character and you think to yourself: Maybe, with just a few changes here and there, I could make them a success after all. So you break out Mids' and trawl the forums, swap some powers around here, some slots around there, create a newer costume, make a few changes to the back-story and maybe add a pet Rikti Monkey sidekick for good measure. Finally, you change your character title to "The" and send them out into the world anew, all the while pretending that their former incarnation never existed.

Surely, this time, success will come and if not, you can always wait a little while and try respeccing again...

There's one flaw with your analogy: most if not all remakes are of *successful* movies. And it's the original movie's success that causes the remake. "Hey, if it made money before it can make money again with a new audience." Very rarely (afaik) does a movie that does poorly at the box office get remade.

Not so much complete failures, but more and more often these days movies that weren't quite as successful as hoped or movie franchises that had started to run out of steam, such as Spiderman, Fast & Furious and, arguably, X-Men First Class.

I think a more appropriate analogy is where a freespec is given because Enhancement Diversification, Invention enhancements, Inherent Fitness, or some other monumental change is introduced. Your "build" was perfect or at least good enough, but due to some changes like CG, it needs to change. Say I created this movie twenty years ago. I had this scene in my head that I couldn't add because the technology just didn't exist. Now I can add it in, but instead of adding just one scene, I can change the interaction between a few of the characters because I think they would do better to provide depth to the movie.

A few years ago I re-did my dryer's venting configuration and said "I respecced my dryer." In response, I got this look:



That's what the OP reminds me of.

Movie Reboots are just Lazy (fix'd it for you).

Hollywood seems less and less interested in new original concepts that might require them to take a chance at the box office and more in name-recognition-based cheap rewrites/reboots of tried and true properties.

Reboots are basically the Reality TV Shows of the cinema. Usually not (as) expensive to do, and even if they're really, really horrid they'll draw attention (aka receipts) of ghoulish rubberneckers just lining up to see the bodies on the highway.

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

The problem is that most modern remakes respec out of their mez protection and pick up Flurry.