By that, I mean when an old and dormant franchise tries to reboot itself (often, again) and even if the new film (or show) has some success, it's largely forgotten over time compared to what it was intended to be rebooting.
It's actually hard for me to narrow down on a few specific examples of the lost-to-obscurity outright failed reboots, but did you know Rollerball (the 70s movie) had a post-2000s reboot? That's one example.
Disney has a habit of making live-action reboots of old animated films they gave a dull "reality" treatment to and most of them are already forgotten compared to the cartoons they came from.
Spider-Man's been rebooted so many times they made a movie about the rebooting! The "middle children" of those reboots seem to only exist as footnotes already.
No one seems to have asked for Scooby Doo's latest reboot (which is just an edgy nepo baby that removed Scooby Doo from Scooby Doo and wanted to turn Velma into a personal avatar) and while suits keep it going for now, it's not likely to be remembered either.
I even saw this happen with Prometheus and its sequel, which were not quite reboots but did retcon a lot of known lore, such as the outright stupid "real" origin of the Xenomorphs and the fate of the Space Jockeys that was so forgettable that I don't even remember its name. Alien(s) is still discussed, and those are not so much.
Similar deal with the Star Wars Disney Trilogy, which while technically not reboots functionally were because Abrams doesn't play well with other people's toys and had to kill/blow up most things that had been built up before he showed up so his "soft reboot" could happen. Come to think of it, the 2009 Trek film series had a similar issue.
Is there anything out there to discuss this "new and shiny and maybe even profitable reboot fades into irrelevance" phenomenon?
We heard you like watching boys, dont you?
