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With the news earlier this week that Spiderman 4 is dead in the water and a reboot would instead be taking its place I got to thinking how Hollywood seems to be lacking in original ideas. Original ideas that make a lot of money, anyway. Reboots, relaunches and remakes are all the craze in studios lately. While all redos haven’t been horrible, are they all really necessary?

Heres a short list of some recent or upcoming remakes:

• Superman (1978) – Superman (2006): Seems the comic book route is ripe with the reboots. This one though, may even go the route of yet another reboot. Wait and see.
• Halloween (1978) – Halloween (2007): Rob Zombies remake was well done and well received and even garnered a sequel of its own. That said, its hard to improve on a classic.
• Star Trek (1979) – Star Trek (2009): Most in need of the reboot treatment as the iconic series was pretty much left for dead. The retreatment of the ST universe was well done and leaves people eager for its sequel.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) – A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): Again, necessary? Not really. Plus, I’m having a real hard time picturing a Bad News Bear — Jackie Earle Haley — donning the glove of blades.
• Friday the 13th (1980) – Friday the 13th (2009): Another classic in horror/slasher movies, not to mention it spawned countless sequels, regardless on how much more campy each one became. Necessary? You tell me.
• The Karate Kid (1984) – The Karate Kid (2010): While casting seems intriguing at best, was it necessary to retell this story?
• Batman (1989) – Batman Begins (2005): Of the original and its sequels, the sequels seemed to be the most in need of a redo. Batman Begins did well to start the franchise again though.
• The Crow (1994) – The Crow (2011): This is probably the one I cringe at the most. It saddens me even more as I am a huge Crow fan and feel the sequels alone were more than enough of an attempt at tarnishing a great movie. I’m not too comfortable with it in the hands of the guy that brought us League of Extraordinary Gentleman. They better look long and hard at who they choose to play the part. Anybody even close to Edward Furlong and I’ll be looking for this in the $5 dollar bin at Wal-Mart.
• Spiderman (2002) – Spiderman (2012): 10 years between original and reboot. Not necessary, at all.

I’m sure to have left out some, but these were the firsts to come to mind.

Want to throw any others into the mix? Pass em along.

And this just covers reboots. Lets not forget sequels. Some are expected, even necessary, while others are just a waste of film, I’ll save that part for later.

Oh and when they decide Bill and Ted need a reboot, I’m running for the hills and looking for Rufus to make sure it never, ever happens.

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Chicago Alderman, James Balcer, a decorated war veteran, seems to take the stance that Avatar makes Marines “look like lunatics.” and “Well, they never mentioned America but when you have the eagle, globe and anchor (the Marine Corps emblem) it has to be America.”

You’re so right Mr Alderman, the logos, emblems or crests that extremists/mercenaries use, always hide any love/hate for a particular group or organization. However diluted their stance may be, that’s how they seem to operate! I don’t like it, or them for that matter, but I don’t lose any sleep over it, either. Same goes for a bunch of movie characters. If nothing else, maybe they’re trying to keep the characters as true to life as is possible in a SciFi flick.The basic plot of the movie (which I haven’t seen yet, but plan on seeing soon) is a group of mercenaries invade a planet for its precious ore and the blue people fight back.

For once, can we just let a movie be just that, a movie! Personally, I don’t care what messages may or may not be hidden in a movie. If it’s a good watch, I watch it. If it’s not, I don’t. Plain and simple. If the people we put in charge of running our city would stop worrying about every damn thing other than our city, maybe they could get something accomplished. Like the horrendous city budget deficit, or maybe in light of those deficits forfeiting their damn raises. Regular people get raises when they excel at their jobs, not when they do a bad job and spew crap out of both ends. A pay cut would make much better sense.

This rant will get off topic quick if I don’t shut up. Then again, it may already have, who knows …

Anyway, why hide a message? I’ll just say your stance on a simple movie is a waste of my time, for having to endure it.

If the creators have a hidden message in the film, it should be “Thank You!” for inflating their bank accounts, $10 at a time.

I’m going back to watch Rambo and watch how it portrays Vietnam War Veterans as unstoppable, blood thirsty maniacs who like nothing better than shooting and blowing up everything in sight. See how ignorant that sounds. Give me a break.

Why not mount a symbolic war against something that matters, like the unemployment rate.

And before I get any people reading this who may be on the side of Alderman Balcer and think I don’t care about our Armed Services, I’ll note that my step-father is also a Marine and Vietnam War Veteran. He took two bullets in combat. And like him, I have pride in my country, the Armed Services and what they stand for and fight for.

I’m really done now, I swear.

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The Top 10 Grossing Movies Worldwide, 2000-2009:

A few interesting points about the top grossing movies of the decade:

• Only two years of the past decade are not represented in the Top 10: 2000 & 2004
• Top Grossing Film released in 2000: Mission Impossible II, Overall Rank: 47th ($545,300,000)
• Top Grossing Film released in 2004: Shrek 2, Overall Rank: 13th ($880,871,036)
• The six Harry Potter movies released to date, all in the past decade, rank (in order of release) 5th, 14th, 21st, 10th, 7th, and 8th and grossed a combined $5,387,568,861
• The three Lord of the Rings movies were released in the past decade, and rank (in order of release) 16th, 9th,  and 1st, and grossed a combined $2,911,519,252
• The three Pirates of the Caribbean movies were released in the past decade, and rank (in order of release) 30th, 2nd and 6th, and grossed a combined $2,671,936,780

Thanks to IMDB.com for the box office stats, I manually dug through the info to pull the tidbits of information above, mainly because I had nothing better to do.

I won’t give anything away. But, I can easily say it’s one of the best horror/suspense movies we’ve seen in a quite a while, with good, slow build up and an excellent finish. We want to go see it again at theaters and probably will. Can’t wait for it to hit DVD either, as from some of the articles I’ve read, multiple endings were shot, and the ending in the theatrical release is NOT the original ending, I hope they all make it into the DVD extras.

Go See It! You won’t be disappointed.