A summer of sequels and reboots just passed, and it’s time to look ahead … to another year full of sequels and reboots! A quick analysis by Vulture of next year’s releases shows that one in three films will be either a remake, reboot, rerelease, sequel, or prequel. As one might expect, the summer will be especially rich in déjà vu: Half the films in both June and July carry the DNA of films past — which sounds like a lot until you get to August, when two thirds of the movies do.
No genre is safe from freeze-drying: Action will get Journey (to the Center of the Earth) 2, Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance, and Die Hard 5. Horror will get Underworld Awakening and The Amityville Horror: The Lost Tapes. Not content with $1.8 billion in worldwide grosses from weepy tweens, Paramount will rerelease Titanic, this time in glorious, wallet-shrinking 3-D! Sequels? You like sequels? How about The Expendables 2, Madagascar 3, Step Up 4, or Scary Movie 5? Didn’t care for Relativity’s March remake of Snow White? Give it another chance in June, when Universal releases Snow White and the Huntsman!
Believe it or not, 2012 actually marks an ever-so-slight (a little more than half a percent) decrease in movie cloning from this year, but it is nonetheless a marked increase from 2010, when “only” one in four movies in wide release was based on preexisting material.
