Reboot cinema

In the summer of 2012, Sony released Mark Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man to what might best be described as critical bafflement. Although the film was praised for the performances of its leads, Andrew Garfield (as Peter Parker) and Emma Stone (as Gwen Stacy), many mainstream critics felt compelled to acknowledge that the film appeared just a decade after Sam Raimi relaunched the Spider-Man franchise and only 5 years after Spider-Man 3, the final installment in the Raimi series. Critics were baffled that Webb’s film felt compelled to retell yet again the origin story of how Peter Parker gained his powers, prompting a number of critics to remark upon the accelerated process of Hollywood studios reviving franchises that are perceived to be exhausted (see Ebert, 2012; Berardinelli, 2012; Dargis, 2012; Travers, 2012). This process of restarting an existing media franchise by returning to its origin point has become known as a ‘reboot’, and this technique has been used to revive interest in franchises ranging from Batman to James Bond and now functions as a normal part of industry strategy, one that allows studios to generate a sense of textual novelty that will encourage audiences to attend movies in theaters. Of course, as a number of these critics pointed out, one of the motivations behind the Spider-Man reboot was the desire to take advantage of the three-dimensional (3D) format and to provide Sony with new, but familiar, material not only for selling a transmedia franchise but also for promoting the technological shift to digital projection in theaters.

This article argues that the reboot is the cultural form that best explains our cinematic moment, one that is characterized by both the widespread promotion of 3D films and 3D technologies and the ongoing reliance upon blockbuster franchises. On the one hand, many Hollywood studios continue to rely upon a business strategy that emphasizes a limited number of transmedia franchises, which are often based upon a small range of characters familiar from comic books, TV shows, and previous movies. In fact, as Janet Wasko (2008: 45) has observed, the focus on using ‘recycled ideas’ through remakes, sequels, and adaptations is central to a Hollywood business model that thrives on offering a careful mixture of textual novelty with familiar and easily marketable plots and characters. These recognizable features allow studios to exploit familiar narratives and characters in their efforts to reduce their risks when marketing cinematic texts through a variety of formats and commercial tie-ins (Neale, 2000: 237). But as these franchises begin to age and reach a stage of critical or commercial exhaustion, their potential for novelty – and profitability – diminishes. As a result, studios have begun to rely on the textual approach known as the ‘reboot’ in order to revive the audience’s interest by allowing a new creative team to restart a franchise unencumbered with the narrative histories of the prior films, even while many viewers are acutely aware of the many different iterations of that character in comic books, TV shows, movies, and even video games. Perhaps the most successful example of the reboot was Christopher Nolan’s reimagination of the Batman origin story in Batman Begins (2005), which sought to take the garish imagery and campy villains of the previous cycle associated with Joel Schumacher and replace them with a heightened sense of realism and political relevance. But in all cases, reboots seek to return us to ‘year one’, to the origins of a character, so that the story can be retold in a different format or style.

On the other hand, rebooting also exists as a technological and industrial practice when it comes to movie exhibition. The contemporary revival of 3D filmmaking – spearheaded by James Cameron’s Avatar in 2009 – has served as a means for restructuring movie distribution, in large part by providing movie theaters with an incentive to convert from film to digital projection. Cameron and others frequently described this changeover as an ‘upgrade’, as they sought to promote the immersive potential of 3D projection in theaters, a change that was often depicted as revolutionizing cinema (Pierce, 2009). And yet, despite this revolutionary rhetoric, technological auteurs such as James Cameron and Peter Jackson began to argue just a few short years after Avatar’s premiere that the initial digital projectors were, in fact, inadequate to their cinematic visions and called for theaters to upgrade costly projectors to provide what they characterized as a crisper, sharper image (See Giardina, 2012). This connection between 3D and textual and technological novelty is hardly new. In fact, John Belton (2012) described digital 3D as the ‘killer app’ that would provide the industry with an artificial novelty phase that could be used to reboot interest in theatrical moviegoing. As Belton reminds us, 3D has a long history. In fact, stereoscopic 3D was widely used in the 1950s to create a sense of novelty when theaters found themselves in competition with television and other forms of home entertainment.

Thus, the movie industry is caught in two intertwined notions of the reboot, one based around aesthetic and economic attempts to revive familiar Hollywood franchises through the promotion of textual novelty and another around technological and industrial ideologies of progress meant to invigorate interest in theatrical moviegoing through promises of technological novelty. Movie studios and theater owners explicitly promoted this notion of technological novelty to the idea that digital 3D offered an experience that could not be matched at home or in theaters without digital projectors (Belton, 2012; Tryon, 2013). In fact, Avatar director James Cameron, no stranger to cinematic hype, promoted digital 3D as offering a ‘profound’ experience akin to the introduction of sound and color (quoted in Belton, 2012).

These forms of innovation are all caught up in the logic of digital cinema, in which, as David Bordwell (2012) aptly puts it, ‘films have become files’ (p. 8). In other words, movies have been transformed from tangible objects into digital data that can be sent to theaters instantaneously, projected in multiple formats, and stored on servers, rather than on film reels. These changes reshape movie industry practices, turning films into texts that can be upgraded as new formats and platforms become available, a move that opens up digital projection to ongoing ‘reboots’ as technologies change and as audiences grow bored with new storytelling approaches and projection technologies.

As William Proctor (2012) observes, reboots have a unique place within the culture and aesthetics of repetition associated with Hollywood cinema. Unlike remakes, sequels, and prequels, reboots work ‘to nullify history and disconnect stagnant or failed product from a new, cinematic experiment’ (Proctor, 2012: 1). Past versions of the Spider-Man story are ostensibly treated as if they never happened, allowing a new director to place his or her own spin (pardon the pun) on a character’s origins, a move that allows the filmmaker to update the story to speak to contemporary concerns, such as the references to the 9/11 attacks in the Raimi’s Spider-Man films. Of course, most viewers will likely be aware of these past versions, meaning that a reboot may ‘nullify history’ within the storyworld of the characters, even while audiences draw comparisons between them. Thus, rather than ‘nullifying’ these earlier versions, it would be more accurate to suggest that reboots respond to, honor, update, and even challenge past versions. In teasing out the reboot metaphor, Proctor also points out that these films take a franchise that has ‘crashed’ critically or aesthetically, such as the Batman films, and restart it at the origin point and erasing any errors in what he calls the ‘aesthetic processing unit’ (2012: 5). Franchises have been rebooted for a variety of aesthetic and technological reasons. Both the Christopher Nolan’s Batman and the Daniel Craig’s James Bond reboots sought to inject a greater degree of ‘realism’ and grittiness into the worlds of their films, replacing the versions starring George Clooney and Pierce Brosnan, respectively. In other cases, franchises are rebooted to replace stars that are aging out of the films’ key roles, such as when Tobey Maguire became too old to convincingly portray the teen angst commonly associated with the character of Spider-Man. Finally, a rebooted storyline can allow a director to pursue a specific story arc, in much the same way that Nolan’s Batman films trace the evolution of the Christian Bale’s Batman, in order to interrogate the problematic aspects of how heroism is constructed. But with the introduction of digital 3D, we have seen franchises that have been rebooted for technological or industrial reasons as well, in much the same way that many films were remade when sound or color was introduced (See Friedberg, 1993: 175). Thus, although these forms of repetition often inspire complaints about a lack of originality, reboots can actually engage with the original in creative and innovative ways.

The logic of the reboot, as it applies to digital projection, entails a process by which the technologies of theatrical exhibition are subject to perpetual – and often very expensive – upgrades. As Bordwell (2012: 194) has argued, 3D functioned largely as a ‘Trojan horse’ for seducing exhibitors into converting from film to digital projection through the success of early digital 3D films, such as Avatar and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010), as well as through the promises of increased box office thanks to the routine practice of imposing a $3 to $5 surcharge on all tickets sold to a 3D screening. However, much like the worn-out film franchises that have been rebooted, the initial hype that surrounded 3D is now exhausted, replaced by an indifference that now treats 3D as just another ‘price point’ (Poland, 2011, Tryon 2013: 93–94). In particular, industry journalist David Poland (2011) could point to franchises such as the Pirates of the Caribbean films, where 3D seemed to have little effect on box office, with many consumers opting for cheaper two-dimensional (2D) screenings when possible, especially for families with several children for whom the surcharge would have been substantial. As a result, a number of influential technological auteurs – directors whose personal visions intersect with a keen interest in new technologies, such as Cameron and Jackson – have already begun championing upgrades to digital projectors that were installed since 2009, by implying that these projectors have already been outmoded by newer equipment. Perhaps the most notable, and controversial, expression of this desire for upgraded projection equipment involved the Cinemacon preview screening of footage from Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), an event that also allowed Jackson and Cameron to unveil a new projection equipment that would show images at 48 frames per second (f/s), rather than the long-standing industry standard of 24 f/s. The directors hoped to use the format known as ‘high frame rate’ to illustrate the value of the higher definition format in creating an immersive experience, one that would be especially useful in the kinds of epic films that both directors typically make. Notably, Jackson’s preview footage was not well received, with one critic of the format complaining that The Hobbit ‘did not look cinematic’ (Giardina, 2012). Despite these concerns, the faster frame rates were seen as a means of attracting audiences – especially, teenagers who were often portrayed as being satisfied with watching movies on iPads – back into theaters.

As a result, the movie industry now seems to be pushing towards an industrial model characterized by increasingly rapid obsolescence, one that may be unsustainable for many theaters facing expensive technological upgrades, especially art houses and independently owned theaters. As Bordwell observes, by turning films into files, we now have a situation in which movies ‘are now swept up into that format churn characteristic of information technology’ (2012: 205). These format shifts potentially have powerful implications for archivists who seek to preserve copies of movies and, on the industrial level, negative consequences for art house and independent theaters that may find it more difficult to upgrade projection equipment every few years. In the case of The Hobbit, Bordwell points out that the higher frame rates were given tacit support by Regal Cinemas, which announced that it would upgrade as many as 2700 projectors so that they could accommodate the 48 f/s screenings, illustrating that exhibitors would be forced once again to adapt, often at great expense (Bordwell, 2012: 206; see also Makarechi, 2012).

Thus, in addition to rebooting film franchises, digital projection technologies are tied to a desire to reboot cinema itself, with the hope of producing not only new modes of storytelling but also new ways of maximizing profit in an increasingly competitive and unstable entertainment marketplace. These twin modes of rebooting cinema culminated in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), a film that is simultaneously a love letter to film preservation and to film’s special effects pioneer, Georges Méliès, and also a retelling of cinema’s origins, an implicit return to ‘year one’ of motion picture exhibition. Throughout the film, Scorsese highlights the medium’s illusory potential, its relationship to what Tom Gunning (1986) has called the ‘cinema of attractions’. During one of the film’s most dramatic sequences, the elderly Méliès, now the proprietor of a magician shop in a Paris train station, tells Hugo how he came to develop many of his pioneering special effects, which Scorsese’s film recasts using 3D technology. This retelling of cinema’s origin point is highlighted in a flashback in which Méliès describes attending the original Lumiére brothers’ screening of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), where, according to popular legend, audiences screamed and ducked for cover out of fear that they would be hit by the train that appeared to be rushing toward them, thanks to deceptive power of the moving image (Gunning, 1986). In Hugo, this illusion of the onrushing train is intensified through 3D effects, as the train is projected beyond the screen itself. The scene therefore implies that 3D can fulfill the desires for novelty that have been diminished as audiences have become accustomed to 2D films. Furthermore, in promotional interviews that helped to frame not only interpretations of Hugo but even of 3D itself as a format, Scorsese claimed that he had been fascinated by the format from the time that he was a small child when he owned a number of toys that reproduced stereoscopic images (see Bowles, 2011). In this sense, Scorsese takes us back to the earliest myths of cinema (its origin story), revisiting those initial moments of spectatorial fascination, in order to show us how film can again become a medium that contributes to our sense of wonder. Yet, at the same time, we must remain aware of how that sense of spectacle is consistent with the economic imperatives of the movie industry, one that involves competing, and sometimes complementary, incentives for movie studios, theater owners, and hardware manufacturers alike. Thus, by looking at the reboot, we are able to begin to see that 3D is defined not just by the fantasies of immersion and pleasures of spectacle but also by the industrial aims structured around the reboot, both in its technological and narrative forms.