Why is everything being remade?

Somewhere, an executive is probably pitching a gritty remake of The Teletubbies. Tinky-Winky has been evading tax, Dipsy is a failed comedian with an opioid problem, Laa-Laa is a down-on-her-luck single mother, and Po is so autistic he can predict the future. Probably.

My point is, everywhere you look, something old is new again. Games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy VII have all been rebuilt from the ground up. Over in Hollywood, Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, The Naked Gun, and countless other films have all returned in one form or another. Even Moana, which has only been out about twenty minutes is being remade shot-for-shot but this time in live-action. It has become so commonplace that every new announcement is making me act like that picture of Ben Affleck having a quiet, seemingly despairing cigarette.

The usual answer is that Hollywood and the games industry have run out of ideas and we're in an era of collective creative bankruptcy. A Great Depression of the imagination, if you will. While there's certainly an element of truth to that, I don't think it's the whole story. This remake boom isn't really about creativity. It's about economics. And it all boils down to one thing: risk.

Pixels are pricey

Making blockbuster entertainment has never been more expensive.

AAA games routinely cost hundreds of millions of pounds to develop, graphics budgets have gone through the roof, and so has the length of the average development cycle. Hollywood productions aren't much cheaper, especially if they're CGI heavy and that's even before marketing budgets are thrown into the equation.

When projects become that expensive, failure stops being disappointing and starts becoming a thing that could tank the studio. This fundamentally changes how decisions get made, and as a result, originality is the first thing to go.

A familiar title comes with built-in advantages as people already recognise it, journalists already know how to cover it, and social media folks already know what they're going to expect from it and what they will eviscerate for clicks and clout. Plus, Marketing teams already have half their work cut out for them. No one needs to explain what Metal Gear Solid or Harry Potter is as the audience has already done half the work for them.

While originality requires some convincing, a remake just needs a little nudge-nudge wink-wink of "hey, remember this?" This makes remakes and sequels much easier to finance as they're much more likely to make a return.

Nostalgia sells

The kids who grew up during the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s aren't kids anymore. They're adults now. They have careers, families, and they're paying their taxes. Critically, they're also the people writing, making, and developing our entertainment, and all these remakes are coming from their childhood for the most part. The designers rebuilding Silent Hill 2 likely grew up playing the original. Directors rebooting childhood classics probably watched them on VHS until the tape wore out. For perhaps the first time in entertainment history, we're watching an entire generation professionally recreate its own childhood.

It's almost inevitable. People are products of their environment, and for today's creators, they were brought up in a world where video games were commonplace, and action films were the genre of their childhood. Westerns were long gone, Stallone, Van Damme, Willis, et al were in, and superheroes were just out of reach at this point. But not for lack of trying. While Superman and Batman both hit big, they were overshadowed by the sheer volume of testosterone emanating from the huge roster of action heroes at the time.

Technology finally caught up

It's not all nostalgia's fault though. There is another element at play here as technology in both industries has reached a point where pretty much anything is possible. At least in the looks department. The original Resident Evil 2 was terrifying in 1998, but technical limitations meant players often had to imagine what those environments really looked like. Modern hardware allows developers to recreate those places as people remember them, rather than as they actually were, no longer limited by polygons and power.

The same applies to film. Visual effects have reached the stage where stories that once seemed impossible to recreate can now be realised with remarkable fidelity. We can see the Autobots transform and level New York City and actually believe it, or watch Spider-Man web-sling without it blatantly being a length of rope and some shoddy camera editing. Whether that's a good thing is another discussion entirely, but the capability now exists.

We asked for this

It's easy to point the finger squarely at publishers and studios. Corporate greed has been thrown about that much it's almost lost all meaning at this point. Of course, it's usually involved somewhere, but it rarely explains everything.

Audiences have played their part too. Every time people complain that there are no original ideas before buying the collector's edition of a remake, the industry learns a lesson. Every time an original IP struggles while another reboot breaks sales records, another lesson is learned.

Companies don't just follow trends, they follow money. They wouldn't be investing in these games and films in the first place if we weren't turning up to cinemas or picking up copies day one. If familiar franchises consistently outperform new ones, businesses would be irrational not to invest in familiarity. We're voting with our wallets, even if we're complaining while doing it.

The price of playing it safe

This doesn't mean remakes are inherently bad. Plenty of them have even surpassed the originals, fully realising the vision of them in ways that only modern platforms can. Remakes have even introduced classic games and films to entirely new audiences who otherwise may never have experienced them.

The problem begins when remakes become safer than originality itself, and that's what it looks like we're at risk of here. Every remake exists because somebody, at some point, had what they thought was a brilliant idea and took a risk. There couldn't be a Resident Evil 2 Remake without someone first creating Resident Evil. No Final Fantasy VII: Remake without the original.

Nostalgia can't exist in thirty years if there's nothing around today for it to sprout from. If publishers and film studios become too reluctant to invest in new worlds, new characters, and new stories, they'll just keep bouncing around with the same ones over and over again. Eventually, they'll create a future where audiences are tired of the same thing ad infinitum and there's nothing worth remaking. Nostalgia only works because somebody was brave enough to be different in the first place.

Instead of wondering why everything is being remade, perhaps we should ask what today's studios are creating that people will still care about thirty years from now. Because eventually, the nostalgia well runs dry and what will they make then?