Live Long and Prosper: Rebooting Star Trek and Reimagining Fandom

This chapter looks to Star Trek, a reboot that employed a time travel narrative to simultaneously cast the Star Trek universe as a new continuity and strategically recast iconic characters in a parallel timeline. The chapter asserts that the reinvention of Star Trek property as a twenty-first-century blockbuster required an investment not only in its narrative strategies, but also in a discursively reimagined audience, one that included both pre-existing and future fans. It demonstrates the way in which Star Trek highlights the intersecting logics of the film reboot and the mainstreaming of fandom in popular culture, both of which grow out of serial strategies designed to exploit new and established markets.

Anticipating the Reboot: Teasing Top Gun 2

This chapter interrogates the ways in which Top Gun’s status as filmic reference point for Hollywood ‘high concept’ of the 1980s has informed speculation around its new millennial reboot, Top Gun: Maverick. With the new film still unreleased at the time of writing, the essay focuses not on the reboot (or even its promotional materials) but on the anticipation of the reboot as ‘discursive project’. Attending to the paratextual arrays that inform and prefigure media events, it focuses on the period in the mid-2010s leading up to the first official publicity still for Top Gun: Maverick to investigate the dynamics of speculation and nostalgia that accompany the ‘anticipation’ of Hollywood reboots.

Resistance and Empire: Star Wars and the Social Justice Reboot

This chapter attends to recent instalments in the Star Wars series as ‘social justice’ reboots. It employs this term to describe those properties – not only Star Wars, but also series such as Ghostbusters, Ocean’s and Creed/Rocky – in which industrial and commercial priorities of reproduction (sameness) mediate imperatives to address the inequities of access and representation (difference). Attending to The Force Awakens and Rogue One, this chapter demonstrates how parent companies Disney and Lucasfilm judiciously balance repetition and innovation so as to maintain a franchise in which social justice itself is rebooted as a marketable output of serialisation.

The Many Reboots of the Batman

This chapter inquires into the industrial background to, and subsequent rebooting of, the filmed property from the 1940s. This includes the initial ‘pop art’ rebooting of Batman as a television series (1966–8), and subsequently as a film blockbuster (Burton, 1989) and transmedia franchise (1989–97 and 2005–12). Focusing on the ways that different industrial structures and corporate relationships have shaped Batman over the decades, the chapter explores the political economy of Batman to illuminate both the routines of corporate creativity and the particular contributions of media artists and professionals working to generate rebooted versions of Batman that are at once completely new and totally familiar.

Rebooting the Politics of the Sports Melodrama: Creed vs Rocky

This chapter describes Creed as a sequel-reboot which functions as a politically ambivalent, but textually reverent, reboot of the Rocky franchise (1976–90). It asserts that Creed is a film that at one and the same time celebrates the franchise’s deployment of the tropes of the boxing picture and male melodrama, while also updating the racial and sexual politics of the series. Developing ideas on the way film reboots mediate the tension between familiarity and novelty, the chapter demonstrates how Creed rewrites aspects of the original Rocky films so as to create a new political narrative, one that explicitly challenges stereotypes of African-American athletes.

Reboot, Requel, Legacyquel: Jurassic World and the Nostalgia Franchise

This chapter examines the ‘nostalgia’ reboot, a serial form that restarts a franchise at the same time that it preserves and celebrates its past. It identifies films like The Force Awakens and Creed as new films in these nostalgia franchises, but specifically investigates the case of Jurassic World, a film that summons its (pre-historic) past and employs nostalgia as its method of renewal. Describing the nostalgia reboot as evidence of a type of Hollywood remake practice that invests in sequelisation strategies that preserve long-term continuity, the chapter outlines nostalgia-driven pleasures and multi-generational appeal of those reboots that maintain continuity and facilitate immersion in an ongoing, already familiar story world.

World-building, Retconning and Legacy Rebooting: Alien and Contemporary Media Franchise Strategies

This chapter examines reboot efforts within the Alien franchise during the 2010s within the conceptual frame of “transmedia franchising.” Looking particularly at Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, as well as several video games, it analyses how various promotional materials and narrative devices have taken variable approaches toward rebooting this franchise, including retconning and legacy rebooting. The chapter asserts that the Alien universe ‘has not necessarily followed a systematic, planned path,’ and accordingly shows how the franchise’s IP holder (first 20th Century-Fox, now Disney) devised variable ways to appeal to potential audiences.

Rethinking the ‘Supersystem’: Film Reboots and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

This chapter draws upon Marsha Kinder’s (1991) theorisation of the media ‘supersystem’ – that is, an intertextual, industrialised transmedia network – to examine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, specifically the television and film reboots produced following Nickelodeon’s acquisition of the IP in 2009. It describes the way in which the post-2009 Turtles rebooted a supersystem, one characterised by textual mutability and overlapping forms of intertextuality, to create new versions of the Turtles and provide opportunity to expand the franchise. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which rebooting creates a major ‘event’ in the serial life of a property: one that appeals to new audiences and generates fresh merchandising possibilities.

All This Has Happened Before: Mythic Repetition in the Film-to-Television Reboot

This chapter examines the phenomenon of film-to-television reboots. Noting that television has increasingly become a space for expanding and reinvigorating pre-existing story worlds of feature films, it inquires into the intertextual and narrative strategies that are employed when comparatively limited texts are extended and serialised for television screens. Taking the pilots of television reboots of high-profile feature films – Fargo and The Exorcist – as its case studies, it argues that the strategy of adaptation is to uncover the ‘mythic’ qualities and structures of the source material in order to build their respective televisual narratives upon these foundations. This chapter asserts that the development of the mythic value of these original texts is essential for the film-to-television reboot.

Understanding Twin Peaks: The Return as a ‘Film Reboot’ via Anti-Franchise Discourses Within Media Franchising

This chapter argues for the status of t Twin Peaks: The Return as film reboot. Drawing upon Derek Johnson’s work on franchising, Hills explores the extent to which The Return is positioned via ‘anti-franchising’ discourses at the very same time that it is contradicted by a logic of franchising. Outlining David Lynch’s discursive ownership of the eighteen-part ‘movie’, Hills writes that The Return offers up a ‘twin challenge’: an imperative to interpret it as an auteurist anti-franchise but one that simultaneously invests in the brand reinvigoration of conventional franchising.