Reboots: When a franchise has gotten too old for a sequel but it’s also too familiar for a straight-up remake. Accept no substitutes.
And since Hollywood now exists in a state of perpetual repetition, we get a lot of reboots these days. When a reboot works, it injects some new life into an older property, refreshing something stale with a modern interpretation and ideas. When a reboot doesn’t work, you get … well you get the movies we’re about to talk about today, the worst reboots ever made.
Genre-wise, these titles run the gamut from action to fantasy to superheroes to thrillers to science-fiction. They all share one thing in common, of course; they were all motivated primarily by a desire to prolong a money-making series rather than by a desire to tell a great story. If you put the cart before the horse, cinematically speaking, you better have one hell of a horse to push that sucker to the finish line.
What’s surprising about these reboots is how many of them come from extremely talented and extremely famous stars and filmmakers. We’re talking about Oscar winners and A listers. Robert Downey Jr. made an awful reboot a few years ago. Tom Cruise had one a few years before that. From video games turned embarrassing movies to action figures turned bizarre vehicles for Henry Golding, some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood have at least one or two middling-to-unwatchable reboots in their pasts. And the longer those franchises run, the more likely they’ll make more of them.
The Worst Reboots Ever Made
These reboots were meant to revive long-running franchises. They did the opposite. Ranked from least offensive to most unbearably terrible, here are the worst reboots ever made…
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