Hollywood Franchise Reboots Are Full of Overpowering, Stultifying Reverence

I don't need new movies to venerate older movies!

perhaps this was when my soul died

The big movie this past weekend was Scream 7; I’m conflicted by this success. The original Scream is a movie that’s very dear to me, in a variety of ways. It’s just so damn good, for one, but also it came out when I was 14, and it helped determine my aspirational sense of what being a teen was or could be. (An interesting thing about nostalgia for your teen years is that you’re not just being nostalgic for your reality but also for your idealized sense of what those years meant at the time.) But oof, did I not like this entry. The new movie is plagued by the same problems of burnout and fatigue any franchise like this encounters, plus others that are particular to the Scream films. Metatheatrics tend to go stale even more quickly than conventional storytelling - “wow, this movie knows it’s a movie!” just doesn’t age very well - and fake outs about the identity of the killer(s) are impossible to pull off with any panache when everyone knows that they’re coming in every single entry. To that, you can add the fact that this film was supposed to be the last entry in a trilogy that jettisoned one star for speaking out in defense of Palestine and another who quit in protest over that firing. The fact that it’s a tired, jumbled mess is not surprising.

But what I really object to, here, is the way that these movies have started to get high on their own mythos, the way that they express mawkish, overly serious respect for the past of the series. I hate it! Complaints about reboots and retreads and our deeply stuck culture are dime a dozen, but one of the most obvious problems with reboot/remake/“requel” culture is also one of the least remarked upon: these movies are so often suffocatingly, self-consciously reverent toward the very texts they’re supposedly revivifying. They bow before the altar of their own IP; they genuflect towards what has come before, insisting on the importance of the originals in a way that’s transparently really about making the audience feel important and thus serviced. They treat the past not as material to be worked with but as scripture. And reverence, whatever its virtues in a cathedral, is usually aesthetic poison in a multiplex. Franchise films are a fact of life, and I have liked many in my time, but the last thing that this kind of moviemaking needs is to be more self-serious. That’s what we’ve been getting in the era of the legacy sequel, though, more and more often.

This is particularly glaring when the franchise in question was never built to sustain reverence in the first place. Screams 5, 6, & 7 are particularly depressing examples; the original film worked in large measure because it was so irreverent, because it managed to honor the slasher genre’s past without treating it like a trip to a Holocaust memorial. It invoked the audience’s knowledge of earlier slashers without pretending that those movies were Shakespeare or intended to be. Scream knew the difference between taking slasher movies seriously and taking itself seriously; these newer films don’t.

Directed by genre master Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson (who both wrote and directed this latest edition), 1996’s Scream was a slasher movie that both celebrated and mocked the rules of slasher movies as it executed them with precision. That celebration was the right kind for the slasher genre - fun, cheeky, utterly uninterested in going to church. Slasher films are, after all, fundamentally unserious in the best way. There’s a reason there’s so much humor in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and so many tits in the Friday the 13th films: they had limited ambitions beyond providing the audience with visceral pleasures. The original Scream gently rolled its eyes at the genre while simultaneously delivering on its pleasures. Its famous opening sequence, in which the killer and his victim are both engaged in considering the fundamentally silly conventions of the slasher format, is tense and funny and cruel and reflexive all at once, a shock to the audience and a blast of both grim humor and genuine scares. One thing the original Scream certainly is not is devotional, solemn. It’s mischievous, like the genre it both honors and spoofs. And despite their clear desperation to service longstanding fans of the series, the creators of these later Scream movies keep bathing everything in thick sheets of reverence for past entries.

In the hands of contemporary studio logic, the famous Scream meta stuff calcifies into a solemn ritual. Instead of interrogating horror conventions, the new entries increasingly interrogate the sacred text of Scream itself. The characters don’t just comment on horror tropes, they comment on the legacy of Ghostface, the mythology of Woodsboro, the canonical significance of earlier killers. The franchise folds inward, becoming a commentary on its own past commentary. It stops being a joke about horror fandom and becomes a religious artifact of horror fandom. And the whole point is to make the now middle-aged teens who loved the original - people like me - feel like our special thing is being taken very seriously. That’s what I mean by reverence: it’s not simply that legacy characters are brought back for sentimental applause moments, but also that the tone shifts from playful to protective. The old material can’t just be referenced and exploited but must also be preserved, validated, cited. The new material can only justify itself in terms of its proximity to the old. Instead of asking “What’s funny or scary or interesting now?” the guiding question becomes “How can we honor what came before?” And that’s boring! Honoring old movies in new movies is boring!

We’ve seen this before. Star Wars: The Force Awakens wasn’t just a new entry in Star Wars canon; it was a shrine, carefully dusted, reverently lit. It meticulously replayed the narrative beats of the original (desert orphan, droid with secret information, cantina scene, planet-destroying superweapon) because the overriding imperative was reassurance rather than invention. The architecture of the plot felt less like storytelling than doing a wax paper rubbing of a tombstone. You could sense the caution in every choice, the reluctance to deviate too sharply from the remembered silhouette of a cultural touchstone. And it was all done to reassure a bunch of 40-year-old boys that their beloved IP was being taken very, very seriously. This is your childhood, the movie whispered. Don’t worry! Nothing will violate your memories the way the prequels did. Nothing will complicate your preexisting feelings, either, no abrupt tonal swerves, no moral ambiguity, no aesthetic risk that might disturb the fragile equilibrium between homage and brand management. Even its grittier textures (it looks fantastic) and new faces (it’s impeccably cast) were arranged to produce a sense of déjà vu, not of novelty, all calibrated for maximum comfort. Anakin’s lightsaber would be discovered right on cue; the beloved mentor would fall just at the same time in the plot structure; the superweapon would be destroyed by the heroes, right before disaster and right on schedule. In reboot culture recognition is always the engine of pleasure Surprise, the animating force of most genre movies, is hard to find.

The Star Wars sequels move briskly even at bloated runtimes and are always handsome; they deliver jokes with professional timing and stage their action with polished competence. Their young leads have charisma to burn, and there are moments of genuine charm scattered throughout. Yet the overall effect is fundamentally inert, as if the stories are sealed behind glass. The movies prove that Lucasfilm still know what Star Wars is supposed to feel like to its acolytes, but they never risk discovering what a fundamentally new Star Wars might feel like. In Disney’s anxiety to protect the past, they keep the future at arm’s length. And all of it’s shellacked in several layers of heavy-handed awe and respect for the old stuff, determined to please the older fans who were so displeased by the prequels - which were lousy movies, to be clear, but ones that reflected a vision built on something other than nostalgia and careful brand management.

“OMG IT’S THE MILLENNIUM FALCON! OMG IT’S HAN AND CHEWIE! OMG IT’S C-3PO AND R2D2! OMG THAT GUY LOOKS LIKE DARTH VADER! OMG OMG OMG!”

At least the Star Wars films have always had a healthy sense of their own gravitas, have always been built on self-conscious mythmaking and self-seriousness. The same can’t be said of the Ghostbusters movies. And yet Ghostbusters: Afterlife, turned the franchise that grew out of the original film - a shaggy, irreverent comedy about cranky parapsychologists hustling for grants and bickering over petty slights - into a nostalgia pageant complete with spectral canonization by way of a ghoulish CGI resurrection of Harold Ramis. What had once felt loose, sardonic, and grubby about the Ghostbusters ethos became hushed and reverent, as if the movie were afraid to smudge its own memories. The original’s offhand charm, its sense that these were just oddball small-business owners stumbling into the supernatural, gave way to a mood of pilgrimage. The proton packs and the trap were no longer props in a workplace farce, gadgets lugged around by underpaid professionals trying to keep the lights on; they were relics, polished and presented like sacred objects in a museum case. Even the ectoplasm is treated like some sort of holy substance instead of as fodder for silliness and jokes.

You can feel the screenwriters checking their work against the fan wiki, anxiously ensuring that every reference aligned, every callback was properly annotated. You can imagine why; the 2016 all-woman Ghostbusters, a very bad movie that was hated for everything other than being very bad, clearly spooked the studio into pure nostalgia-humping mode. Instead of trusting the elasticity of comedy, they turned to the rigidity of canon. The result was two new films more concerned with preserving a legacy than with generating mischief, more intent on affirming what had already been loved than on risking being loved for something new. Which is, of course, the plight of movies and all other narrative art in the 21st century.

“WHOA! IT’S THE ECTO-1! WHOA! IT’S THE PROTON PACK! WHOA!”

This is bad enough when applied to straightforward adventure stories. It’s catastrophic when applied to something like Scream, which was born as a reaction against much of modern horror’s self-seriousness and an attempt to harness the pure fun and thrills of the slasher subgenre. A reverent Scream is a contradiction in terms. The whole point was to puncture the pomposity of genre conventions, to insist that the audience’s awareness of cliché was part of the fun. But the reboot-era installments (culminating, in many ways, in Scream 7) treat the franchise’s own tropes as untouchable. The meta-commentary has become pre-programmed. The “rules” speech, where a character in the movies explains the conventions of the type of movie that Scream films belong to, is no longer an organic satirical device; it’s a mandatory set piece, and one that’s barely even played for laughs anymore. Wouldn’t want to offend the fanboys!

And now we’re entering a new phase, something another layer deep: content that is reverent not only of its past but of its own recent iterations. The later seasons of Stranger Things are prototypical here. What began as an affectionate but lively remix of 1980s genre cinema curdled, over five seasons, into a self-memorializing machine, ending in a dreadful final season that both routinely violated the plot history of past installments and acted like the viewers should feel grateful to be blessed with new chapters in their holy book. And the culprit is obvious: the show’s own success. The more that people loved Stranger Things, the more the creators felt pressure to treat their own creation as something hallowed instead of something silly, as something holy instead of something built on fun. And so over time the show referenced its own lore with increasing solemnity, even as it became more and more reliant on retconning. Characters were introduced not because they were dramatically necessary but because they could be martyred in ways that echo previous seasons and in so doing produce deeply false emotional climaxes. (Not Alexei, the Russian redshirt we barely know!) Musical cues, character beats, even camera moves came to feel less like creative choices than like callbacks to past moments that the show had decided were iconic. It’s like an ouroboros, but the snake is sucking its own dick.

Reverence is annoying on its own terms; I much prefer genre entertainments like action, horror, and comedy to be fun rather than self-impressed. But reverence is also bad because it inevitably breeds redundancy. Once the primary goal becomes to preserve and venerate what has come before, surprise becomes dangerous, innovation risks sacrilege. And so you get films and shows that seem weirdly afraid of themselves, constantly looking backward for permission. The irony, of course, is that the original entries in many of these franchises were anything but reverent. They were brash, risky, even disrespectful. That’s why they worked! If we’re condemned to live in an era of endless reboots and remakes and requels, the least we could ask is that the new custodians of old IP treat it as clay rather than crystal. You can honor the past by transforming it; you cannot revitalize it by kneeling before it. And in the case of a franchise like Scream, to kneel is to misunderstand the point entirely. Remember when the point was to have fun?