Image: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Netflix
Consumers vote with their wallets and amid the rise of new distribution technologies over the last 20 years, changing audience behavior has forced strategic change from Hollywood. Like a frustratingly difficult level of Super Mario Bros., the major players have been, well, playing it safe. From the superhero boom of the 2000s to the blockbusterization of television in the 2010s to the true streaming wars of the 2020s, Hollywood has fully embraced familiar intellectual property as their north star of content development in hopes of capturing fragmented audience attention. More specifically, the entertainment industry has receded to the seemingly safer ground of recycling their own IP libraries.
Reboots, remakes and revivals have become a popular tactic in the last decade and a half as original, new-to-screen concepts struggle to cut through the clutter. But just how prevalent are these nostalgia-fueled projects, where streaming platforms rely mostly on built-in fan bases and what does the future hold for these strategies?
In 2023, reboots, remakes and revivals accounted for a 3.4% share of scripted shows released in the US, according to Parrot Analytics. While this marked a jump from 2.4% in 2022, it was also down from 2021 which marked a five-year high at 5.2%. That year saw high-profile releases within this subcategory that included Sex and the City revival And Just Like That…, a new iteration of Gossip Girl, a remake of The Equalizer, an American version of Ghosts and more.
Last year, Netflix generated the largest TV catalog demand share of the major SVODs via remakes, reboots and revivals in the US at 7.6% even as just 3.2% of its small screen library was comprised of such shows. Since demand outweighs supply, this strategy has been fruitful thus far for Netflix, which scored big wins with recent remakes such as One Piece and Avatar: The Last Airbender. In terms of supply, Paramount+ accounts for the largest share of remakes, reboots and revivals in its library at 4.9%. Welcome back, Frasier Crane.
Across Netflix, Paramount+, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Peacock, Hulu and Disney+, these types of TV titles represent only a small portion of the total catalog. And yet in each instance, demand is larger than supply. In many cases, the new version helps to drive renewed interest to the original title. This creates a beneficial halo effect that is also monetarily efficient from a content budget standpoint (two for the price of one!).
Audience familiarity with a previously successful IP helps cut down on marketing challenges and typically elicits a higher floor of early viewer buy-in. As such, expect them to continue to be made. But creatively speaking, an over-reliance on such titles is stifling and unhealthy for the longevity of critically and commercially successful storytelling. There are only a finite number of intellectual properties that were successful enough in their original iterations to garner multi-generational interest that warrant recycling. Eventually, the flow will slow.
Reboots, remakes and revivals will still play a role in slate development for the foreseeable future. But the industry has also realized that nostalgia and familiarity can be leveraged in new packages.
Stranger Things carefully utilized its 1980s setting and overt homages to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King to deliver a recognizable yet singular series. Taylor Sheridan both blends and reinvents Westerns and Crime Dramas for successful new shows with modern stylings that harken back to entertainment of the 20th century. As the superhero genre is no longer a guarantee of a blockbuster hit, more traditional action films such as John Wick, Top Gun: Maverick, The Beekeeper and more remind us of the hard-hitting flicks of the ’80s and ’90s.
Hollywood trends tend to be cyclical and slowly but surely the industry appears to be gravitating back toward “original.” Or, at the very least, familiar yet new.
