What’s the difference between a remake, a reboot, a sequel and a requel?

There’s no doubt we are living in a franchise era.

There are – and hopefully always will be – original stories, but major studios writing the big cheques cannot resist the siren call of intellectual property and an existing fanbase, even though those things are hardly a guarantee of a return on investment.

What’s familiar is the story de jour, and it has been that way since the start of this millennium. If you look at the global box office results, 2000 was the last year in which the majority of the 10 highest grossing films were original films (or just book adaptations).

That year, it included Gladiator, Cast Away, What Women Want, Meet the Parents, What Lies Beneath and the Perfect Storm. The following annum, the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies topped the charts – and the balance between franchise and original never tipped back.

That was a pivotal year because in addition to those two fantasy powerhouses, it was also the year of Monsters Inc, Shrek, Ocean’s Eleven, Planet of the Apes, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Legally Blonde and The Fast and the Furious, which would all go on to spawn sequels, prequels, spin-offs and remakes.

With so many iterations of a known quantity flying about, it’s hard to get a grasp on the jargon. Like, how is a remake different to a reboot to a reimagining? What makes something a sequel versus a spin-off?

We’re here to help.

SEQUEL/PREQUEL

A sequel or a prequel is the most straightforward franchise entry to define. It is the next or prior chapter of the same story, following the same main characters. There’s a clear narrative and emotional throughline from one to the next.

Think Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Wick: Chapter Two, Top Gun: Maverick and Paddington 2, which are all examples of great sequels.

Sometimes a film is a combination of both sequel and prequel – The Godfather Part II, for example, picks up the story of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) as he settles in to be the new Don of the mafia family, dealing with business and attempts on his life.

But it also flashes back to the earlier life of Vito (now played by Robert De Niro), and explores how he went from being a nine-year-old in Sicily to becoming the head of a crime family in New York City.

The Godfather Part II is considered one of the best sequels in cinema history, proof that the second one isn’t always worse. Ditto The Empire Strikes Back, which is the second Star Wars movie which was retroactively reclassified as Episode Five after George Lucas made those three prequels between 1999 and 2005.

REQUEL

Which leads us to the requel. These movies exist in the same narrative universe as the main earlier films, but its focus shifts to a new generation of characters.

They’re not a remake, as they’re sometimes erroneously called, because they keep the existing canon already established by its predecessors but it is a passing of the baton.

The term requel was popularised in the fifth Scream movie, a franchise that is intentionally self-aware. It’s a perfect illustration of how legacy and new combine – here, the main characters are first-timers Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega), but Sidney (Neve Campbell), Dewey (David Arquette) and Gale (Courtney Cox) are present, and whose stories are a continuation of where we last left them.

The Creed movies also fall into this category. The main character is Donnie Johnson, the son of Apollo Creed, who is newly introduced into the Rocky world. He’s a new generation, but Rocky Balboa is still a supporting character.

Arguably, you could say the same about the third Star Wars trilogy starting in 2015 – The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker – because while Leia, Luke and Han are all in the films, the next gen Rey and Ben Solo/Kylo Ren are the leads and drive the story.

SPIN-OFF

Which is different to a spin-off, which takes an existing side character or event, and gives them the full spotlight treatment in their own story but while still maintaining the canon of the main films.

Still on Star Wars, Rogue One is a spin-off (and a prequel), because it takes one detail from A New Hope, which is the smuggled Death Star plans, and builds out a whole story of the heretofore unknown Rebels who stole them, with very little crossover from the main storyline.

Finding Dory is a spin-off, as is Hobbs and Shaw which took two supporting characters from the Fast and Furious movies.

Note that when Vin Diesel in the past has said he was interested in creating a spin-off with the Dom character, that’s a load of nonsense. Dom is the main character of those movies, and if you’re making a movie in which the lead was already the lead, that’s a sequel.

REMAKE

These three labels have been grouped together, but they shouldn’t be taken to mean the same thing – there are distinctions.

A remake is straightforward, it is what it says on the label. It is a remake of the original and will largely keep the storyline and the characters but it might change up, for example, the setting or the era.

The Parent Trap, when it updated from 1961 to 1998 is a good example of a great remake, or The Lion King live-action version, which is a remake albeit not a good one. The point is, fidelity is key.

REBOOT/REIMAGINING

A reboot isn’t so married to the original. It might take the broad strokes of the story or the characters, but it doesn’t even have to do that.

The Batman movies throughout the ages are reboots because it resets the continuity and doesn’t follow what came before. Matt Reeves’ Batman is very different to Christopher Nolan’s which is different to Tim Burton’s.

Or think of The Invisible Man, which was rebooted by Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell in 2020 with Elisabeth Moss as its lead character, and the story became an allegory about intimate partner violence and coercive control.

There was also the 2019 TV series Roswell, New Mexico, which was rebooted from the 1999 Roswell TV show, and an adaptation of the Melinda Metz books. Here, the characters have been changed to the daughter of undocumented immigrants, which gives adds a different dimension into a story about outsiders, and reflected the political milieu of its updated context.

Reimagining is basically a fancier way of saying reboot, which was a term the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica liked to use because that iteration was so different in tone, structure and even story and characters to the 1978 one.

BUT THEN WHAT IS JAMES BOND?

The Bond movies are a whole other thing unto themselves.

It’s part of one franchise but doesn’t necessarily share continuity from one actor iteration of Bond to another, sometimes not even from one movie to another under the same actor.

The closest is that it reboots itself from one era to another, but, up until now, had remained under the creative control of the same producers (Eon Productions and the Broccoli family) this entire time.

With Amazon MGM now in charge and casting for a new Bond, the next film will be proper reboot. After all, the Daniel Craig Bond was, for the first time, killed. So there is no way to keep that canon.