What do you call a movie that takes place after the events of a previous film, features the same characters and has the same creative team?
That’s not the set-up to a joke; it’s a real question that’s plaguing marketing executives at studios. As audiences grow wary of Hollywood’s tendency to revisit and recycle, words like “sequel” and “reboot” have become taboo.
It’s no secret that the entertainment industry relies on remakes, spinoffs and prequels to survive. This month’s “Scary Movie,” the sixth installment in the horror-parody franchise, just riffed on this very notion, branding itself a “rebootquel.” So why is Hollywood so sensitive to these terms?
“Audiences have been trained to think ‘sequel’ means homework. People want something new, so when you put a ‘2,’ ‘3’ or ‘4’ in the title, it gets a groan,” says veteran marketing and distribution executive Marc Weinstock, who recently consulted on A24’s “Backrooms” and executive produced “Scary Movie.” “’Reboot’ just sounds like something was underperforming so we’re going to redo it. ‘Remake’ is the same. People think, ‘Oh, you’re just recycling stuff we’ve seen before.’”
So when there’s a gray area, studios have been testing out new ways of framing a movie in marketing materials. Sony, for example, is insisting that “The Social Reckoning” isn’t a sequel but rather a “companion piece” to “The Social Network,” the studio’s Oscar-winning 2010 drama about the advent of Facebook. Sure, there’s a new director (Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter of the original, is taking over for David Fincher) and a new actor is playing Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong replaces Jesse Eisenberg, who turned down the project). But the film, which opens in October, hails from the same studio, which brought back several behind-the-scenes creatives to tell another chapter in the dark saga of the social media platform. The newly released teaser trailer even ends with the same memorable, haunting theme song from the first film.
Sony isn’t the only studio that’s getting linguistically creative to convince the masses that it isn’t just rehashing what’s worked in the past. Disney has pushed for live-action adaptations of animated classics like “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast” to be called “reimaginings.” A24 used the same word to describe “Obsession” director Curry Barker’s upcoming take on the 1974 horror classic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Universal billed 2024’s sequel “Twisters” as a “new chapter” of the 1996 disaster movie of (nearly) the same name, since the original stars didn’t return to chase more storms.
“There’s a desire to focus on what is fresh and worthy of discovery,” says one marketing executive. “If something is a ‘reboot’ or ‘remake,’ you think ‘I’ve seen this before.’ If it’s a ‘reimagining,’ you think, ‘Oh, I want to see what they’ve done.’”
Some movies are genuinely difficult to categorize. Sony’s 2025 action-comedy “Anaconda” was too meta to be classified as a reboot or a sequel. The movie, starring Jack Black and Paul Rudd, followed best friends who travel to the jungle to pursue their childhood dream of remaking their all-time favorite film, 1997’s “Anaconda.”
Attempts to create distance from predecessors don’t always work. Lionsgate tried to pitch the Ana de Armas-led “John Wick” spinoff “Ballerina” without highlighting the association. But when audience awareness and pre-release box office tracking were low, the studio was forced to tack on a cumbersome addendum — “From the World of John Wick” — to the title.
Amazon MGM, on the other hand, is comedically leaning into sequeldom for the follow-up to the Mel Brooks 1987 sci-fi parody “Spaceballs.” Although there was a long-running joke that the sequel would be called “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money,” the actual title for the 2027 release is “Spaceballs: The New One.”
Part of the aversion to certain words is that studios don’t want audiences to think they have become too safe or too lazy, relying on extending popular properties when they could be investing in new ideas. Brand awareness gets people in the door of multiplexes, but executives feel that “reboot” and “remake” don’t always properly reflect the artistic ambitions of movies that take a known story in new directions.
“There are sensitivities around ‘reboot’ in particular because it implies you’re just reheating the property, when there’s an actual differentiation,” says a studio source.
That concern has been reinforced by a 2024 study from the National Research Group, which found that 75% of Gen Z audiences prefer watching original content over remakes or franchise fare. Noting the tastes of Gen Z is important because they are now the most active group of cinemagoers, attending more films per year than their elders, according to a Fandango report. It’s not that younger moviegoers are opposed to familiarity. “Backrooms” was IP, after all. But the demo isn’t showing up for new installments in known properties just because they used to be popular.
“Everyone is working to keep the momentum with younger audiences, who are a little more cynical,” says the marketing executive. “They’re excited about creative risks.”
When Paramount was gearing up to release the second “Top Gun,” the studio chose the title “Top Gun: Maverick” rather than “Top Gun 2” to avoid losing audiences who hadn’t seen the original 1986 movie; both star Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. The studio also ditched the numbers for 2022’s “Scream” reboot, which is the fifth installment in the slasher series, as well as the most recent “Scary Movie,” which brought back the Wayans brothers after a 25-year absence. Once younger audiences were hooked and “Scream” successfully revived the property, the studio returned to digits in the title for 2023’s “Scream VI” and this year’s “Scream 7.” (It’s unclear, however, why there was a switch between Roman numerals and the decimal system.)
Though fewer movies seem to have numbers in the title these days, sometimes the connection is helpful, especially when it’s an inescapable fact that a movie — like Disney’s Pixar sequel “Toy Story 5” or “The Devil Wears Prada 2” — is part of a franchise.
“It’s a tricky balance,” Weinstock says. “Audiences want familiarity, but they want the feeling of discovering something new.”
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