Hey all,
Wondering why are there so many remakes or reboots of movies & games in particular in the last few years?.

Is it because studios are lacking creativity ?? (i doubt bringing old games or franchises to the big screen for new viewers is the main reason...)

Because the 10usd budgeted for this years AAA's creativity and storyline has been used up again.

If the genre is currently in demand, a reboot is usually a safe investment, since half of the work is already done and it was proven in the past that the theme can bring in the money.

And no, it's not a recent trend, is has been going on [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanDirt]forever.

With the massively high budgets of movies and AAA games today, it's considered less of a risk to just sell people something they already like rather than coming up with something unfamiliar that might totally flop.

3. Sure win. Even the seasoned veterans that know the old franchise will going to buy out of curiosity and to whine about how bad it is afterwards. Like an anti-fanbase that still spends money.

Same reason that there's sooooo many movie remakes lately as well. Creative bankruptcy, imo.

I actually enjoy remakes and updates... good way to experience things you missed or would like to play/watch again.

Gah! Links with no warning!

It's a trap!

+1 for both. tvtropes is addictive work killing poison.

The people holding the purse strings want calculated projections on what their return on investment will be. You look at a existing property and say it made X number of dollars, and has a fan base of Y number of people, chance of making money 80%. So you get a remake of Robocop or Total Recall. The same calculation is done with Harry Potter with an additional we can make it into 8 movies and you get Harry Potter given the go ahead. Anything else and you need the fan base to be based on the actors or the director, then you get Adam Sandler movies and George Clooney movies, and these might be original properties but usually like more of the same from those actors.

If you think about all the movies being made the remakes are not really a large percentage. The risk of losing money lead to publisher taking less risk and betting on what seem like a safer bet, the remake. Probably other reasons as well but my opinion that this is the main reason.

Big movies and games cost a lot of money to make. Studios are playing it safe by sticking to established properties. Since these productions must be as mass market as possible they have to keep story lines and worlds simple necessitating a reboot every couple of years to keep everyone on the same page.

Probably the same reason every early arcade game got remade and rebooted to every console known to man... money!

it's because they make more money.