• Inside Entertainment,  Media Rants

    Respecting Canon

     Warning: this blog contains a spoiler for Terminator: Dark Fate. (However, the spoiler covers the opening minutes of the movie, so it’s not that much of a spoiler!)   Who started the Hollywood reboot? I’ve been trying to puzzle this out – who’s truly responsible? We’ve always had remakes of movies – although I’ve never understood why. If you have a good movie (or a good song), why remake it? Wouldn’t it be more logical to take a property that didn’t quite work, and remake (and fix) that? I understand the financial implausibility – a studio is unlikely to fund a remake of something with no proven commercial viability, but…

  • Inside Entertainment,  Media Rants

    Bond, James … Bond?

    If the Bond franchise were released today, the first one would be great, the next would be okay, and by the third it’d probably be puttering. That’s the route of a lot of modern-day franchises: e.g. Transformers, the Bourne series, Lethal Weapon. By the third movie, most franchises are starting to look worn, and whenever there’s a fourth instalment, it’s usually positively comatose. That Bond survives is because it’s an institution. It’s fifty-years-old. We just accept that instalments will be released. What’s more, the Bonds have an existent fan-base who’ll sustain them. New fans are made (or at least new fans might trial the franchise) because it’s iconic and they…