I won't be the first to point out the trend of movies and shows getting unnecessary and unasked for sequels and reboots. It's been widely discussed as a phenomenon, and is usually explained with the simple logic of "studios want safe IPs, most don't want to take serious risks."

That's true, yeah. But there's another layer to unpack there, which is the increased frequency with which they come out. It doesn't take a genius to realize that working with an already popular franchise is going to make more money. It's absurd to think this thought is new, when it's so seemingly obvious. Yet, while sequels and reboots have always existed, they seem unusually prominent now. Why?

Let's consider reboots and sequels as part of a wider genre of media revival, a genre that also includes adaptations. When we include adaptations as part of this tradition, we see that this revival tendency has been prominent for basically all of film history, it's just the things being revived now are no longer books or plays, but just other movies and TV shows.

This, in my mind, is incredibly telling as to why the reboot apocalypse is upon us: it's not that franchise revival is new, but rather that we increasingly live in a world where non-televised media isn't widely consumed. The endless reboots, then, are a factor of our increasingly post-reading society, one in which book adaptations are far less guaranteed to secure an audience.