Reboot Rethink

Article by Chris and Brendan Mowrer

Rebooting a franchise’s story can sometimes become a necessary step when writing for older franchises. Canon can become a tangled web of side-characters, major events, ret-cons, and more. A fresh start in the form of a franchise reboot can simplify back to the central meaning of the franchise story while keeping the most relevant pieces gained from years of storytelling.

A good reboot can offer great clarity and benefit to a franchise that suffers from complexity and opaqueness. Your lore can become less messy and more cohesive. Fresh fans will have an easier time getting involved from the new jumping-on point, and you have the unique opportunity to update your meaning with newer and more relevant context.

Let's use Transformers as a good platform for discussion of reboots. This IP has gone through many different iterations over the course of its long tenure as a beloved toy and entertainment IP. These various iterations each have additions or changes to continuity that contribute to a weighty mythology that was becoming increasingly less easy to penetrate as a new fan.

The newest movie, Transformers One is a successful reboot through simplifying the mythology and beginning with a familiar-but-fresh take on the characters. This movie is also a great jumping-on point for new fans whether they be younger or simply missed the bus before. It starts right at the beginning, before the Transformers arrive on Earth, and skips the mountain of background info without changing the heart of the characters, or the meaning of the franchise.

Other ways a reboot can be successful is when updating the relevance of a franchise. Guardians of the Galaxy was largely an obscure comic series in its original form. James Gunn’s trilogy as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe gave the IP a face-lift, allowing a formerly unknown franchise to find relevance by dialing up the message of found-family in the reboot.

These opportunities are all enticing, but reboots don’t come without some level of risk. Thousands or even millions of people can be fans of a particular franchise, so rebooting it could be considered a form of iconoclasm, and not in a good way. In some cases, the original form of a franchise or story is special because of the circumstances in which it came into being. To reboot The Lord of the Rings in a post-Tolkien world could have bordered on the sacrilegious. Unusually, this property has a timeless context. It lives outside of needing to keep the setting current such as in an IP like Batman or The MCU. The Lord of the Rings is also not the Lord of the Rings without existing an expression of Tolkien himself. This is evidenced by the strong reaction The Rings of Power has managed to illicit.

When looking across all IP, a franchise that has undergone numerous radical reboots can also make it harder for fans to justify investing in each iteration, if the expectation is that the next one is likely not to be what they love about a previous version. True fandom is passionate, personal and meaningful. Changing that mix too often or too radically can be leave your fans behind. Conversely, there are properties that need something dramatic done to reboot them as they have lost their relevance and don't have a vibrant and active fan base.

The DC Universe has rebooted continuity many times over the course of its long run. There are plenty of good reasons for those reboots, but having many different story and lore continuities can cause friction for fans looking to delve deeper into the universe of the IP. Information can contradict itself, overlap, or otherwise muddy the waters.

Another effect is fracturing of the fan-base into camps. Bronze-age, Silver-age, Golden-age fans all follow different reboots and see them as the best. Perhaps this is good and a Bonafide strategy for fan growth. The key is to have the different lanes all love the underlying core franchise, and for each lane to have a significant enough fanbase to preserve those continuities in their own lane vs in a wholistic franchise reboot.

At the end of the day, a good, clean reboot for the right franchise has great potential to bring in new fans, and if done right boosts relevant meaning of the IP.

There is so much to consider when doing a reboot and we hope this short article helps in embracing understanding what you have, what the state of your fan base is, and catalyzes a lively discussion about how much to rethink, evolve, or leave whole.

Cheers, Chris and Brendan