This is a question I see so many people get confused over. What’s the difference between a remake, and a reboot, and a reimagining?
The best way to explain it is with examples and case studies.
I’d say Peter Jackson’s King Kong from 2005 was a remake of the original from 1933. It took the same plot, characters and events.
In the case of the more recent Skull Island King Kong films, these are what I’d say fall into the category of reimagining, which itself is a type of reboot. It’s a clean slate and a fresh start and attempts to do brand new ideas compared to the original. It’s a reboot in that it has no connections to what came before, and it is a reimagining in that it doesn’t attempt to stay true to the original in an intentional way.
I’d say The Amazing Spider-Man was a reboot. The films starring Andrew Garfield were basically the same as the Tobey Maguire films, but changed details here or there and told different stories. None of what came before was meant to carry over.
So, yes, it was the same character and also like the first Tobey film, it was an origin story, but it didn’t specifically try to tell the same story. It was also a complete change of cast, and saying the events of the previous series no longer tied into what they were now making. That is a reboot.
If you then take something like the James Bond film Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig, this is an example of a soft reboot. It definitely took the story back in time and didn’t continue the story from any of the previous films, but there was still some connective tissue in that Dame Judi Dench played M, a character she had played for the past several films before the soft reboot.
Another soft reboot would be like going from Hulk to Incredible Hulk. The cast changed and they didn’t explicitly acknowledge anything from the first film, but the Incredible Hulk didn’t fully retell the origin of the character and seemed to pick up from a point similar to where the first film ended.
A full reimagining is something like Wicked. It takes the basic scenario and characters from the Wizard of Oz, but doesn’t aim to tell the same story and tells a new story that doesn’t actually fit in with previous lore.
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