Live Poll: Best Movie Reboots

@jeorj_euler​ & @gabriel_gomez_v1f5ssvze4xd,

I agree you can't just slap any next installment with the "reboot" label. I think Gabriel is right on the money on nineteen of his twenty-two answer options. Of the three outliers, one is a judgement call, one is a spin-off installment, and the last one is a prequel installment. There are very specific requirements to be called a reboot, as jeorj points out.

Plus your question asks

​These movies revived franchises, which is your favorite?​

A better phrasing might be: ​Which of these movies that revived a franchise with a rebooted take is your favorite one?

• Based on the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting and has no connections to the film trilogy released between 2000 and 2012. I am not sure a decade is long enough to be called revived, but I agree it is boderline. Plus, the latest movie starts the film series anew.

• The Bumblebee film is the sixth installment in the Transformers film series, originally planned as a prequel to the 2007 film but later called a spinoff. It follows the previous released installment by only a year, that gap is not long enough to call the series being revived.
• Prey is the fifth installment in the Predator film series and is a prequel to the first four films, being set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719. It follows the previous released installment by four years (two years, plus another two Covid-19 delayed years), that gap is not long enough to call the series being revived.

FYC, I would remove the two non-reboots, Bumblebee and Prey from your answer pool. You can replace them with the better-suited, Terminator Genisys (2015) and Ghostbusters (2016) which are unequivocally reboots.

I don't think it has much to do with how long it has been since an earlier movie. If a film series has grown stale in any way, or has been seen as concluded, that's enough to say that a reboot has "revived" a franchise.

@Peter_pbn​

I think that is a fair point and accurate. Actually, I think we are both wrong, it has more to with the money to be made, control of the rights and protecting the franchise. Time and freshness play a part only in how much money can made from the distance. 'The Hulk' (2003) and 'The Incredible Hulk' (2008), which reboots the franchise, after five short years are a great example of this. The character and franchise was subsequently rebooted again four years later in The Avenger (2012) with Mark Ruffalo's version.

After the mixed reception to Universal's 2003 film Hulk, Marvel Studios reacquired the rights to the character though Universal retained distribution rights. In 2006, Zak Penn wrote three script drafts that were much closer to the comics and the 1978 television series of the same name. In April 2007, Norton was hired to portray Banner and to rewrite Penn's screenplay. His script positioned the movie as a reboot of the film series, distancing it from the 2003 film to give the new version its own identity. 

The fifth live-action Terminator movie, Terminator Genisys, was definitely intended to be a reboot, but I can see how it was the soft style, since we're inherently dealing with alternate timelines. The studio decided not to create the next part of the particular continuity (whereby the being "born" inside the simulation running on a supercomputer network would grow to become Skynet), and instead created yet another timeline for the sixth Terminator movie, Terminator: Dark Fate, that picked up where Terminator 2: Judgment Day left off, but involving travel apparently across timelines or from future worlds not causally linked to the present in any significant way. The Sarah Connor Chronicles television series shows yet another timeline, picking up after T2.

Paul Feig's Ghostbusters, is definitely a reboot of the franchise of Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters. However, it is even more so a parody, happening to bear all the exact trademarks of the original franchise. Whereas Ghostbusters: Afterlife is both a sequel and seemingly a soft reboot, but I don't know how serious the plans are for continuation of it. By omitting references to Ghostbusters II, the makers are signaling the intent to retcon the events of that one out of existence. For instance, the audience should legitimately be wondering about how Dana's son Oscar wound up. Do we even know for sure who his biological father is? Dana's neighbor Lewis could be his father, since the key master (Vinz Clortho) and the gatekeeper (Zuul) had to consummate the assignment in order to open the rooftop portal through which the bizarre, tyrant, ancient deity (Gozer) traveled, but that would only mean that Oscar could be the twin brother of the growth-accelerated, supercharged female human body momentarily inhabited by the deity.