Scrolling through my TikTok, and what do I see? An ad for a new Practical Magic movie, coming out in 2026. I would love to think that in another world, a world where the brutally cynical part of my brain had not yet opened my eyes to the reality of the financial structures behind moviemaking, I would be excited. I loved the movie growing up, so why wouldn’t I be?

Instead, my first thought was—oh shit, another great memory will soon be ruined.

I love movies. I grew up watching magic come to life on screen, actors making me think and feel with a single expression. I am also incredibly obsessive about things I enjoy, so when I watch a movie and like it, I need to know everything about it. And I mean everything. From every writer who took part in the process of writing or even advising on a script to the makeup artist giving an actress a subtle smokey eye, only to be noticed when her face is zoomed in on during a heated scene. Needless to say, the industry fascinates me. Or at least it did.

This story might come across as a hate piece, and honestly, I wish I didn’t have to write it. I wish with every fibre of my being that I could go to the cinema, pick any film and satisfy my unbearable need for originality. But with a few exceptions, they don’t play original films in cinemas, they don’t stream them, and they don’t mention them in countless articles by mainstream publications. No, that place is reserved for the fourth part of the Bridget Jones series and whatever new movie Dwayne Johnson will be in next. So I am left sorting through websites, googling the words ‘where to watch’ until my fingers cramp.

I also wish I could just let this go. Be a normal person who complains about her frustration to her friends at dinner and then moves on with her life (aka. doesn’t spend hours of her life writing a story about it). But alas, my frustration is too deep, and writing is the only way I can release it, so here I am, loudly complaining. And here you are, reading this. So I guess we both have nothing better to do, and I hope we’re both just so done with all these remakes.

It annoys me to see the movies I once loved turned into easy cash grabs, their legacies tarnished, and their perfect endings rehashed and turned sour.

Remember how they drove into the sunset together? Do you want to know what happened beyond the sunset? …No, I really don’t. Honestly. Just leave it alone.

The lack of originality in mainstream movies is honestly jarring. Original movies pop up here and there, and when they do, I watch them with genuine pleasure. That pleasure doubles when I then go on my phone and see that another beloved 90s/2000s classic is getting a remake/revival—I understand how special that experience of originality was. I can write an essay on how much I loved watching Ryan Coogler’s new masterpiece Sinners and how incredible it is that, with its smart symbolism and important messages, it actually made it to the mainstream and became beloved by the public.

And I get it, the world is going crazy, so sometimes you don’t want to keep thinking while watching a movie (although that’s lowkey what movies are for, but okay). I know that everyone, from people who were in their 20s living a carefree life to kids who grew up watching these movies, gets a certain sense of comfort from the beloved and iconic characters. I know that everyone wants to take the warm memories of their youth and wrap them around like a warm blanket, cosy up in the nostalgia.

There it is, that word—nostalgia. Slap a familiar title on it and wait to count your millions while people play the new Freaky Friday movie and try to reunite with the same feelings they felt when they watched the first one. The thing is, they never do. The pesky little problem with nostalgia is that, by nature, it is a need for a feeling that can never be fully relived. That’s why it works.

That’s why the studios spend an obscene amount of money to get established actors to reprise old roles. And by studios, I mostly mean Netflix. Somehow, it’s almost always Netflix. Sure, Prime and Disney are also up there, but the main culprit is Netflix.

I honestly don’t know what kind of large round sum they paid Linsey Lohan to star in all those, let’s say, odd Christmas movies. Actually, I just googled it; it’s not publicly disclosed, but it’s speculated to be in the multi-million dollar range. Wow. I’m sure they couldn’t think of anything better to spend money on. Okay. 

Another issue with these big remake/revival movies is that they usually flop at the box office. It takes a couple of people to go see the movie and post about how shit it actually was for everyone to quickly realise that not only is the movie not going to quench their thirst for the good old days, it will ruin any pleasant memories they previously associated with the characters.

Add to that the studios thinking that putting one minority character in a movie that was made in the ’90s and is therefore inherently problematic in one way or another will suddenly make it modern and relatable. It is as annoying as it is completely out of touch. What they are left with is part of the internet (the weird and scary part) calling the movie ‘unnecessarily woke’ and another part saying that adding this character, whose main purpose is simply to hit the diversity check mark, is not the step towards a more inclusive future in the film that they think it is (which, honestly, true).

Regardless, the movies keep being made with little to no changes or, let’s be honest, any level of critical thinking involved. They have a formula, and whether or not it works, they keep using it.

What pisses me off further is that I have seen directors and studios pull off good-quality remakes. Many beloved movies were remakes of older versions of those movies, or they were based on foreign movies with similar plots. Denis Villeneuve was not the first person to take on the task of transferring the complex text of the Dune novels onto the big screen, and the famous Martin Scorsese movie The Departed was an English-language remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.

There is a difference between taking an existing concept and adding your own creative vision to it and bluntly following the same style—trying, and ultimately failing, to continue telling a story that has not only reached its logical conclusion but has been told a million times since (and told in better, more original ways).

Solving my frustration would be quite easy; I can just ignore the countless revivals, remakes and retellings and focus on better films. Solving the problem at large, well, that would require a big personnel change, and for capitalism to cease to exist, I guess—you know, just those silly little changes. Surely, that can be done.

I will be waiting for a time when a year will pass with no announcements of revivals of old films in sight. I might be waiting forever. As for the new Freaky Friday, Practical Magic, Now You See Me, and so on—I will be respectfully abstaining.