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Variety

Veteran Critic Writes, ‘‘Charlie’s Angels’ AGAIN? How Reboots of Reboots Became the New Normal’

Aug 9, 2016  •  Post A Comment

In case you’ve been thinking that the reboot thing has gotten a little out of hand, you’re not alone.

Variety’s chief film critic, Owen Gleiberman, devoted a column to the phenomenon this week, noting: “Reboot mania is in the air. The doors are wide open. The properties are sitting there. The creative minds, and the accountants, are getting to work. Who said that Hollywood has run out of ideas? There’s a whole galaxy of movies out there, a lot of them recent, just waiting to be remade!”

Gleiberman notes that the reboot is far from a new idea — “Hollywood, of course, has been remaking movies ever since there were movies,” he writes. But he adds that it began picking up momentum a few years ago, when old sitcoms such as “Bewitched,” “Sgt. Bilko” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” started being turned into feature films.

“If you’re looking for the moment when a certain Remake Fever 3.0 took hold of studio executives in a way it hadn’t before, it was probably sometime in the last two decades, when we began to witness the strip-mining of movie nostalgia, with the remakes of films like ‘The Karate Kid,’ ‘Arthur,’ ‘Clash of the Titans,’ ‘Fame,’ ‘Total Recall,’ ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘The Hitcher,'” Gleiberman writes. “That few of those remakes were any good was obvious the day they came out, but to gripe about the remaking of old movies is, by now, an old story.”

What’s a newer story, according to Gleiberman, is the rebooting of reboots. We encourage readers to click on the link near the top of this story to read Gleiberman’s full analysis on the Variety site.

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