Why do we keep remaking films and TV shows?

Over the last decade, the proliferation of streaming services made more movies and television series available to more people than ever before. It revolutionised what we watch (including the importance of recommendation algorithms to help us sort our preferences) and how we watch it (hence the rise of binge watching).

And while prestige back catalogues and perennially rewatchable sitcoms — from ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ to ‘The Office’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ — were initially valuable commodities for attracting new subscribers, keeping them meant “original” content and “exclusive” series.

Suddenly, a phenomenon characterised by unprecedented abundance ran up against the problem of scarcity. ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Squid Game’, ‘Severance’ and ‘Widow’s Bay’ became outliers in a digital landscape largely bereft of new ideas — which would see the companies follow Disney’s lead and race to secure the kind of intellectual property that can be serialised and spun out in new iterations for years (like Netflix’s purchase of the Roald Dahl Story Company for almost US$700 million in 2021).

The problem of scarcity has also served to accelerate a trend that is as old as Hollywood itself: the tendency to adapt, recycle or remake already existing material. Some of the greatest cinematic achievements after the advent of sound were themselves either adaptations of stage plays or remakes of silent-era films, to say nothing of the steady stream of literary fiction and bestsellers that were turned into cinematic masterpieces (two of the prime examples from the early 1970s being ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Jaws’).

And then there are those successful films and television series whose first (and often best) instantiations were outside of the United States — we could think here of Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) and ‘High and Low’ (1963), ‘The Office’ (2001-2003), ‘Broadchurch’ (2013) and ‘House of Cards’ (1990-1995) in the UK, or the Danish version of ‘The Killing’ (2007) — which would go on to receive “the Hollywood treatment”, with decidedly uneven results.

But there does seem to be something different going on with the relentless sequence of remakes and franchise reboots, where companies are cannibalising their own IP (such as Disney’s determination to turn its back catalogue of animated films into live-action movies), trading on audience nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s hits (which covers everything from ‘Transformers’ and ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’, to ‘Jurassic