Media Studies Scholars on Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots

Did we as a culture ask for Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising? Is Hollywood's alleged addiction to remakes, reboots, sequels, and other 'multiplicities' anything new? We asked three media studies scholars to debate the concept of originality in entertainment, what it means for the media to disparage perceived repetition, and how audiences interacting with an entire product like Star Wars: The Force Awakens—from pre-production to marketing—

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impacts how we read cultural output.

Participating in this discussion are Amanda Ann Klein, an associate professor of film studies at East Carolina University and co-editor of the new volume Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television and American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures; Jonathan Gray, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts among other titles; and Will Brooker, the first British editor of Cinema Journal and Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University. Brooker has spent the last year living as David Bowie for the forthcoming book Forever Stardust.

You can find Amanda Ann Klein on Twitter @AmandaAnnKlein, Will Brooker @willbrooker, and Jonathan Gray @jonathanagray. Read Jonathan Gray's wonderful media and culture blog Antenna here.

Scholars in Conversation

Amanda Ann Klein: The release of The Force Awakens back in December got many moviegoers, fans, and anti-fans alike disparaging the film because it is a primary example of a “multiplicity” (a category which includes adaptations, sequels, remakes, imitations, trilogies, reboots, series, spin-offs, and cycles). Why is it that people are so critical of texts which appear to replicate other texts? Why are we so devoted to the idea of “originality”?

Will Brooker: Are we, though? People went to see the recent RoboCop, Total Recall, and Point Break—all remakes of movies that to me, seem almost part of the recent past. People optioned, produced, starred in, and distributed those movies. It’s true that they weren’t especially critically successful, but if we as a culture were so devoted to the idea of originality, they wouldn’t exist. If we were so hung up on originality, Fantastic Four wouldn’t have been remade last year, The Amazing Spider-Man wouldn’t have rebooted that character so quickly after the previous Spider-Man series, and we wouldn’t be seeing a new Batman in theaters this spring. We wouldn’t be seeing a new Bourne movie advertised now. We wouldn’t, surely, have seen Mad Max: Fury Road, and we wouldn’t have seen it critically acclaimed, because it’s essentially an unoriginal idea, an addition to a franchise, arguably a soft reboot of some form. We wouldn’t have a Marvel Cinematic Universe that generates so many different movies under the same umbrella, and on one level is just made up of endless sequels to the first Iron Man. And if these remarks seem to refer only to one (broad) genre—action/SF/superhero—look how many literary adaptations and movie remakes of TV shows have been released over the past five years.