Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis – i.e. Jake, Matt, Josh and the weird Korean kid who keeps asking us to post his Doctor Who fanime drawings – has no doubt noticed a paradigm shift in how The Hollywood conducts her business. No, I don’t mean it’s no longer necessary to blow your way up the corporate ladder. CAA still summons its agents by reciting lines from the Necronomicon and Harvey Weinstein still eats babies. Authentically retarded A-list actors are still given carte blanche to kill as many hookers as they like without fear of consequence and executive incompetence is still rewarded with big promotions and bloated bonuses. What has changed however since the industry’s Golden Years is that movies are no longer culled from original ideas, stories and/or characters. New and Original are risky propositions – not from a financial perspective mind you, but from the perspective of having to sell the idea to your boss. Reading a script is out of the question and hearing a pitch means actually having to sit in the same room as one or more screenwriters… who as everyone knows are creepy, child-molestery, poorly dressed, afflicted with chronic halitosis and likely carriers of the Mexican Bacon-AIDS. So resourceful producers and execs turn to the wellspring of comic books, cartoons, crappy toys, board games and bubble gum from which to derive their films (wish I was kidding about that last one). Still, even these sources require some degree of work; As brilliant as Slinky The Movie’s one-sheet might look, at some point an icky writer must be hired to string together some semblance of story for the second unit to shoot between parkour sequences and explosions (“it walks down stairs, alone or in pairs… I smell love interest”). Which is why the safest bet by far is what’s known as the “reboot”: Take an existing film – preferably a successful film – and do that. Again. Only with prettier actors, more CGI and stripped of pesky elements like subtext, meaning and heart. L33T up the title and throw some dated nu-metal on the soundtrack and BAM! C1T1ZN K4NE (now with rocket launchers!) is the $300 million summer blockbuster Orson Welles didn’t have the BALLS to make.

Way back in 2007, when these “reboots” were more exception than rule, we relished them as fodder for our long-winded, snark-riddled rants about the forehead-slapping idiocy that results from removing “creativity” from the creative process. But now that this is the industry’s BUSINESS MODEL, we can hardly keep up. And so we bring you STUPID HOLLYWOOD… our new column wherein we compile the week’s dumbest of the dumb.

ALIEN

While the sequel Aliens is arguably a better film, Ridley Scott’s original Alien brought us several of the greatest scenes in horror film history, and Stan Winston’s creature design is still the benchmark to which all movies monsters are now compared. So naturally Ridley jumped at the chance to produce an xtremed-up, CGI-and-splosions version of his best film (yes, I’m a member of the “Blade Runner is overrated” camp). Only THIS time the franchise will be placed in the capable hands of director Carl Erik Rinsch, famous for his… uh… car commercials (props to /Film for compiling this career retrospective of Mr. Rinsch).

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

While the original feature would at best be considered a sleeper cult hit, the spin-off TV show built itself a legion of devoted fans thanks to the quirky dialog and compelling characters brought to life by creator Joss Whedon. How original was Whedon’s voice? Name me another TV showrunner who has fan conventions devoted not just to one show but to his entire body of work, who has rabid followers eager to digest anything he does regardless of genre or medium. So naturally, when considering a reboot of the franchise, the wisest move would be to remove the only thing people liked about it in the first place… namely, Whedon.

TOMB RAIDER

Ah yes. Let us journey back to those heady days of 2001, back when Friendster was our only means of online social networking and our iPods had a mere 10 gigs of memory. Our new president was poised to unite the world with peace, love and harmony and some swarthy, box-cutter-wielding Arabs played a hilarious practical joke on the city of New York. But I think what people remember most about 2001 was pre-baby-hoarding Angelina Jolie’s turn as Lara Croft in the video game adaptation Tomb Raider. If only we could return to those more innocent times… what’s that you say, producer Dan Lin? We can? But this time with the generic, white-bread, piss-poor acting skills of Megan Fox filling out the lead role? Sign me up, Dan Lin! Let’s get in Doc Brown’s DeLorean and take a ride back to the salad days!

FLETCH

Remember how much everyone loved it when Harrison Ford “passed the torch” to America’s favorite action star, Shia Labeouf, in Lucas and Spielberg’s incomprehensible meh-sterpiece Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Come Crystal Cathedral Whateverthefuckitwascalled? Well now Chevy Chase – who hasn’t been funny since people actually drove Chevys – is considering doing the same thing with a new Fletch movie. This is actually a new sub-species of the “reboot,” which shall hitherto be known as the “torch passer.”

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