By Graeme McMillan at io9
Looking back at the fictional stories that defined the last decade, you might think of things like The Dark Knight, Battlestar Galactica, or failures like Bionic Woman and Speed Racer. Was this the decade we ran out of original ideas?
Okay, that’s obviously not completely fair; after all, this last ten years have also seen things like Lost and Twilight winning over new fans, not to mention the end of the Harry Potter book series. But there’s no denying that this has been a decade of recycling ideas: James Bond, Batman and Star Trek all got movie reboots (Trek also got a television one, if you count Enterprise), Star Wars gained new life as a TV show, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica was reborn to much acclaim, unlike fellow television reboots Bionic Woman, Knight Rider and V.. The most successful “new” media franchises were Transformers and Spider-Man – based on ideas that are over two decades old (You could even argue that things like Lost and Twilight are simply mashing up old ideas into relatively new forms; they’re definitely standing on the shoulders of giants, at least). So what happened?
It’s easy to just say “Well, the geeks are in charge of media now,” even if it’s not necessarily untrue. But that doesn’t explain how they got there, and why they’re not making us fall in love with all manner of new things, instead of retreads of old flames (Does Fringe count as new, or just an updated X-Files?).
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It really does seem like Hollywood has run out of ideas sometimes. But we’ve gotten some great stuff out of it (Battlestar, Star Trek) along with the stinkers.And it seems like the remakes of old Sci Fi opened the door for the new stuff to be made (like District 9).
Do you think the remakes are a good idea, or do you think Hollywood is getting lazy?
