Netflix Nostalgia: Reboot?
The news has been swirling with announcements related to reboots of popular television shows and movies. TV shows such as “How I Met Your Mother”, “Sex and the City”, “Gossip Girl”, “Full House”, and many more have come out with reboots over the past few years. According to Daniel Herbert, associate professor of film, television, and media at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, “Hollywood’s somewhat recent obsession with reboots is as much about the money they generate as it is with the audience’s obsession with nostalgia.”
Reboots are a new way of thinking about how Hollywood repackages and recycles material. Rebooting is a lot like remaking a film, but better. It is changing to keep up with the times, while maintaining the original storyline. As a society, we are thirsty to see new versions of stories that we know. As a culture, we are ambivalent about seeing old ideas come to fruition again. The reboot is a careful negotiation between media makers and audiences that we will be seeing the same ideas, though we all agree that it will be new and modern enough to be good
There is obviously the nostalgia of the experience of watching a character you know or seeing what has happened to them since you last left them. But there are also very relevant reasons to reboot something from the past. For example, “Gossip Girl” was perfect for the moment it aired, but now it would not fit with the times. We have undergone tremendous and rapid changes around the issues of identity and representation that are sparking a lot of reboots. The new cast of “Gossip Girl” contains women, BIPOC and LGBTQ in lead roles, becoming a performance of social justice. Another example of this is “Creed”, with Michael B. Jordan, which is a part of the “Rocky” franchise but now with a Black lead.
Reboots are generally monetarily successful. There is a real economic incentive to make consumers cling onto familiarity. Disney and Warner Brothers, among other production companies, are actually in the intellectual property warehouse business- they make movies and television because they have loads of IP and are looking to capitalize on it. They make movies, television, etc., because they have a bunch of IP and they’re looking to turn it into money. Essentially they are taking assets they already have and commercializing them over and over again.
