by Judson Cade Pedigo

As Justice League opened with a less than heroic debut, (I dunno, I still think 96 million is a lot of money. If I get a hundred bucks in my wallet I feel like Scrooge McDuck) people are already speculating how Warner can reboot their entire cinematic universe. What world are we living in where a reboot is the only answer? A world gone mad, mad with reboots. Used to be when we got say, a Star Trek the Motion Picture, they didn’t just scrap the entire “enterprise”, we just had to wait a little while until we got a Wrath of Khan. If something doesn’t work, I don’t think that throwing all that time and money away for a fresh start is the answer. What happened to taking a little extra time to fix what didn’t work and make something worthwhile instead? In this new world where Spiderman gets two reboots in 15 years, this is clearly not the case. Horror fans have been hit especially hard by this trend. They are cheap to produce and, if done right, can yield high profits. There have been sequels to remakes, prequels to remakes, sequels to prequels of remakes, sequels to earlier entries, creating such a mess that you really need a manual to figure out what you’re about to see. This is why Wikipedia was invented. Leatherface was the first to fall, then Michael Myers, Jason, and then they did the unthinkable, they recast Freddy Krueger. That last outing didn’t do so well for them so guess what word we heard next: reboot. While we’re waiting for the reboot of the reboot of A Nightmare On Elm Street, we can look to one of the last remaining horror icons still continuing their original story from the 80’s, Chucky the killer doll. Somehow, Don Mancini, the creator of Chucky, is responsible for writing every installment of the series about a Good Guy doll gone bad. What makes Mancini a rare breed in this day and age is that he embraces something that’s become a dirty word in Hollywood, continuity. It’s become increasingly easy to just rewind the clock and hit the reset button, but Mancini not only embraces what’s come before, he celebrates it.