Reboots can get people amped about long-dormant franchises when they’re done well. Look at Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, or the recent Mad Max: Fury Road side series. However, sometimes a reboot does more harm than good for a long-dormant series, making fans and general audiences alike resent the attempt for even existing. Here are ten such examples.
Ghostbusters (2016)
The 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters was meant to bring the franchise back from the dead with an all-female lead cast. Unfortunately, the film was met with hyper-critical resistance from vocal fans online who resented it for even existing. It didn’t help that the movie was only so-so, and it failed to bring the long-dormant franchise back to life.
Superman Returns
So, Batman Begins was awesome and put Bats back on the big screen after two disastrous Joel Schumacher films ruined his reputation. The same gritty approach would do wonders for the Christopher Reeves-era Superman films, right? Superman Returns is part sequel and part reboot, but didn’t give the big blue Boy Scout his own renaissance. Which is a shame, because fans are waiting for another good interpretation of the best superhero character to ever grace the pages of comic books.
Ocean’s 8
Ocean’s 8 was another 2010s-era “let’s remake it with all girls this time” reboot like the 2016 Ghostbusters. This one fared a good bit better than Ghostbusters, though, both critically and commercially. Still, even that moderate success doesn’t seem to have been enough to spark renewed interest in the heist capers as a long-running franchise.
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Tim Burton’s legendarily bad remake of Planet of the Apes is so profoundly stupid and poorly written that it completely failed to generate any new interest in the dormant franchise. Thankfully, the genuinely excellent Rise of the Planet of the Apes kicked off a uniformly excellent modern-day reboot series in 2011.
Godzilla (1998)
It’s a miracle that Toho Co., Ltd. ever let another American director try their hand at Godzilla after the abysmal 1998 outing from TriStar. The script was weak, the acting was wooden, and the redesign of the title monster looked really odd. It’s all good now, though, as Legendary has been knocking it out of the park with its stellar MonsterVerse films since 2014’s Godzilla.
Power Rangers (2017)
There was a big trend of remaking older movies in the 2010s in an attempt to grab that Marvel “shared universe” money. Power Rangers (2017) was one such attempt with the beloved Super Sentai franchise. While the movie got mixed-to-positive reviews, it simply didn’t make enough money to become anything beyond a chrome-colored oddity.
The Mummy (2017)
Speaking of grasping for that Marvel money, do you remember when Universal thought it could do an MCU with its long-running monster movie franchises? The abysmal 2017 Mummy reboot, starring Tom Cruise, was supposed to kick start the “Dark Universe.” If it had been, well, good, it might have had a chance to make a franchise happen. Ooh, maybe Universal should have called in Brendan Fraser!
Fantastic Four (2015)
No studio has ever managed to get Marvel’s First Family right on the big screen, but the 2015 attempt by Fox is particularly heinous. A bland, unlikable movie that ignores the coolest parts of the Fantastic Four mythos, this franchise-attempt just failed to get anyone motivated to watch more bland CGI fights.
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RoboCop (2014)
You might see a pattern emerging. Yeah, there were a lot of middling reboots of older franchises in the 2010s. RoboCop (2014) suffered because it didn’t have visionary Paul Verhoeven at the helm. It also took the central conceit way too seriously instead of recognizing the original movie is a satirical takedown of the militarization of American police departments.
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Hellboy (2019)
This one really stung for fans of the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy movies. Those two excellent pulpy fantasy films starred Ron Pearlman in the title role and were about ten times better than they had any business being. The 2019 reboot, starring the usually-awesome David Harbor, is a shallow imitation of the phenomenal del Toro movies and also an insult to the comic series’ creator, Mike Mignola. Suffice it to say, there aren’t any further sequels with Harbor planned.
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