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Define "reboot" vs. "remake" vs. "reimagining"

Yeah, that's what I was trying to remember. I guess it's a case of history repeating itself or something.

I don't know what we'd call that. :rommie:

"All of this has happened before..."


Is that what she said? Sounds more and more like she was forced to relive what Dorothy had to go through, but with new elements thrown into the mix. Sounds like a headache, really. It was really quite random. It's almost as if they wanted to have something original, yet familiar, which made it look like they couldn't decide what they wanted it to be. In the end, I felt it was quite a bit of a mess, honestly.
 
I liked it, but you're right, it's like they couldn't decide if it was a sequel or re-imagining. I would have preferred if it had been done more definitively as a sequel.
 
Or even a prequel along the lines of Wicked. Wish someone would make a movie out of that, and based on the book, not the play. Would make for a rather interesting movie, I'd think.
 
Yeah, that's what I was trying to remember. I guess it's a case of history repeating itself or something.

I don't know what we'd call that. :rommie:

"All of this has happened before..."


Is that what she said? Sounds more and more like she was forced to relive what Dorothy had to go through, but with new elements thrown into the mix. Sounds like a headache, really. It was really quite random. It's almost as if they wanted to have something original, yet familiar, which made it look like they couldn't decide what they wanted it to be. In the end, I felt it was quite a bit of a mess, honestly.

Um...I was quoting Battlestar Galactica.
 
Yeah, that's what I was trying to remember. I guess it's a case of history repeating itself or something.

I don't know what we'd call that. :rommie:



I'd call it more of an original work based on the works of L. Frank Baum, even if it wasn't a sequel (continuity wise.) For example, it's just like the Cohen Bros film O' Brother Where Art Thou is based on Homer's Odyssey but still an original work of fiction in and of itself.

But yes, as you pointed out a page back, some things just won't fit neatly into a single category or may even require a category of it's own.

P.S. For what it's worth, I thought the idea of making Tin Man a sequel was a neat idea, particularly because they held off revealing that fact until right near the end. Probably where the misconception comes from because for much of the show, one is left with the impression that it's a straight-up re-imagining.
 
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Then there are the sequels to familiar stories which aren't actually following-up any specific previous incarnation of the story, like Hook or Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

A "reimagining" is looser. It takes a similar premise as the original but does it in a very different way. Examples of this would include Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Death Race with Jason Statham, and Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica. (I'm also tempted to put the new Conan the Barbarian movie here but it doesn't quite feel the same. It's almost not a "re-" anything because it feels so unconcerned with any previous Conan productions.)
So, basically, it's a fancy way of saying "remake". I guess this does fit but I really hate the term "re-imagining" -- it sounds so... board-meeting focus-group-ish.

Not quite. Like I said, I think the difference between a remake & a reimagining is how different the stories are. While Rob Zombie's Halloween adds a whole bunch of new backstory elements in the 1st half, the 2nd half follows pretty much the exact same plot as the John Carpenter original. That's why this is a remake. It's the exact same story but elaborates on it in several places.

On the other hand, the plots for Death Race 2000 & Death Race are totally different. In Death Race 2000, it's a Transcontinental Road Race, the cars don't have any guns, and the drivers earn extra points by running over innocent civilians. In Death Race, privatized prisons generate revenue by encouraging prisoners to participate in some fucked up real world cross between Twisted Metal & Super Mario Kart on closed tracks on prison grounds with cars that are armed to the teeth. Other than involving cars and having 2 main characters named Frankenstein & Machine Gun Joe, there's really nothing at all similar between the 2. That's why it's a reimagining.

And it really pisses me off how it seems like every goddamn thing is called a "reboot" now, even when it doesn't apply. Like the new Hawaii Five-0 being called a reboot, or the new Teen Wolf TV series being called a reboot.

I haven't seen either one. Are the new versions of Hawaii Five-0 & Teen Wolf actually continuations of the old versions?

Terminator Salvation is also, simply, a sequel. For instance, John's age in Salvation wouldn't fit with the time-skip in TSCC.

Continuity for John Connor's age is always a bit of a mess. You've got Terminator 2, which came out in 1991, set in 1995, which establishes John's age as 10. Then, during his voiceover in Terminator 3, he says he was 13 when that happened. Since I don't think John Connor's age is explicitly given in Terminator Salvation, I think Christian Bale could believably be playing either a 33 or 25 year old version of John Connor. It's not like the actual age of the actor is relevant. After all, Bryce Dallas Howard is 2 years younger than Claire Danes despite the fact that Katherine Brewster is supposed to be 14 years older by this point. She's also 7 years younger than Christian Bale despite that face that John Connor & Katherine Brewster are supposed to be the same age.

I would say that a Reboot could still incorperate continuity of the previous like you mentioned about Star Trek (2009).

This is where you & I disagree. In a pure reboot, the new version is contrained by absolutely nothing that has come before and can make any changes it wants. Star Trek (2009), while freed up in many respects, is still limited. They can't do anything abitrarily crazy like turn Spock into a woman or change some of the fundamental technobabble-science laws of the universe or make Kirk & Picard comtemporaries. And while time travel makes everything murky, I presume that most of Enterprise still happened in some respect.

Wolverine doesn't fit with the "it's been 15 years" since Logan lost his memories in X1 and 2 or with FC's beach battle. nor does Sabretooth's relationship fit.

Why doesn't Wolverine fit in with the 15 year timeline established by X-Men?

Meanwhile, their listings in the closing credits notwithstanding, I'm working with the theory that, in the movies, Sabretooth & Victor Creed are not the same person. Those names are never used interchangably in the movies. In X-Men, Tyler Mane's character is always referred to as "Sabretooth," never "Victor Creed." In Wolverine, Liev Schreiber's character is always referred to as "Victor" but never "Sabretooth."

I think it's more a case of X1, 2 & First Class being in the same continuity while X3 & Wolverine are in what you might call tangential continuities. They may not contradict previous films and made to be in continuity but subsequent films have chosen to either ignore or erase them entirely. Think Highlander II.

Hell, Highlander II never even fit that well with the original Highlander. In the 1st movie, it's pretty definitively established that Connor MacLeod was born in Scottland, growing up alongside Cousin Dugal. "We've been kinsmen 20 years." Suddenly, in Highlander II, we discover that Connor was transported to Scottland from Zeist/the distant past as a grown man. And according to the theatrical cut of Highlander II, Connor & Ramirez were both sent to Earth at the same time in the 16th century, meaning that Ramirez must have been completely bullshitting that story about having been married to a Japanese princess 2000 years ago. (The director's cut changing it from Zeist to the distant past fixes this one problem.) And why doesn't Connor ever recognize Ramirez in Highlander when Highlander II establishes that they used to be such close allies?
 
Dennis is right. "Re-imagining" is just a marketing term that was created by 20th Century Fox (and subsequently used by other studios) to avoid using the word "remake." It's the same as a remake.

"Re-boot" isn't much different, either -- it just refers to a remake of a series, and probably can be linked to another marketing department trying to avoid the stigma of a "remake."
 
I considered "re-imagining" to be taking the basic premise, but going elsewhere with it. The new "Teen Wolf" seems a decent example. Like the Michael J Fox version, there's a high school boy turned into a werewolf, but this version's not being played for laughs. Though I suppose both might be considered re-imaginings of "I was a Teenage Werewolf."
 
Dennis is right. "Re-imagining" is just a marketing term that was created by 20th Century Fox (and subsequently used by other studios) to avoid using the word "remake." It's the same as a remake.
It doesn't really matter where the terms started, it just matters what the words mean. "Remake" means to do over and "re-imagine" means to change it. The 1997 version of Twelve Angry Men is a remake; the 2009 version of Star Trek is a re-imagining.
 
The difference between the remake of Star Trek and Twelve Angry Men seem pretty negligible to me.

Remake was a good enough term to describe The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars in the 1960s, despite being radical departures from the Kurosawa films they were based upon, and it still works for me.
 
:lol: Words like "reimagining" mean what the people using them to sell to other people want them to mean - no more, no less.

That's why a topic like this can go on for three pages - the only reason. ;)

Remake was a good enough term to describe The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars in the 1960s, despite being radical departures from the Kurosawa films they were based upon, and it still works for me.

Sure, why not? We can also go a little further afield and describe them as adaptations of Kurosawa's work.
 
The difference between the remake of Star Trek and Twelve Angry Men seem pretty negligible to me.
And yet it's not, because one is basically the same, just played by different actors with minor adjustments to make it contemporary, and the other is a radical change to the initial concept and characters that has little in common with the original.

Remake was a good enough term to describe The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars in the 1960s, despite being radical departures from the Kurosawa films they were based upon, and it still works for me.
Maybe it was; but now we have a better word to describe something different.
 
^Plus, back in the 60's I'd wager the average western movie goer hadn't heard even heard of Kurosawa's films, so it's not like anyone besides the odd film student would argue.

Actually, thinking about it now, "remake" might not be too far off the mark for The Magnificent Seven. Most of the alterations made from the original were more of a direct result of cultural translation than just making changes for the sake of being different. Of course in that process the whole peasant/Samurai nobility relationship was rather lost or reduced to something as simple as the villagers not wanting the gunslingers near their daughters...but some meaning is always lost in translation.
 
The difference between the remake of Star Trek and Twelve Angry Men seem pretty negligible to me.
And yet it's not, because one is basically the same, just played by different actors with minor adjustments to make it contemporary, and the other is a radical change to the initial concept and characters that has little in common with the original.


I can't help it, but that sentence makes it sound like Star Trek and Twelve Angry Men are similar :p Cross those two together and you get Twelve Angry Nerds, the contemporary remake :lol:
 
BTW, reinforcing my earlier X-Men theory about the movie versions of Victor Creed & Sabretooth being different people, I just rewatched both movies and noticed in the credits that, while other characters will be billed like "Wolverine/Logan," there is no such designation for Victor Creed & Sabretooth. They're only billed as "Victor Creed" & "Sabretooth," nothing else.

I can't help it, but that sentence makes it sound like Star Trek and Twelve Angry Men are similar :p Cross those two together and you get Twelve Angry Nerds, the contemporary remake :lol:

It's like that bit from The Jamie Kennedy Experiment where he played an obnoxious nerd in a Star Trek focus group.
 
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