So, it’s official (it was announced on Twitter, therefore it is both legally binding and morally binding in the eyes of the Lord): Paul Feig — who brought us Bridesmaids and The Heat is doing a Ghostbusters reboot:

What I want to ask is this: Why does everything need a reboot?

The Wikipedia defines a reboot as

In serial fiction, to reboot means to discard all continuity in an established series in order to recreate its characters, timeline and backstory from the beginning.

This makes sense for some franchises. They made three perfectly good Spiderman movies (I liked them anyway) but then they rebooted it because they wanted to start over.

From a storytelling point of view, I understand the reason. If you reboot things, you’re not tied to the existing — and possibly overlong and overblown — mythos of a work.  So, JJ Abrams does a Star Trek reboot, and he’s not tied to the existing continuity that dates back to before the moon landings.

The problem in that case is that all of Star Trek up to that point — five television series (two of which were good) and 10 movies (three of which were good) — all existed in the same universe. It lasted 45 years without a reboot and was much loved as such.

I understand not wanting to be tied to existing mythos. Dr. Who is a good example of a series that needed a reboot after 40 years worth of episodes under many different hands (with some of them irrevocably lost). Nobody would want to be tied to that continuity.

But with Ghostbusters, is there a need to start over? There was always supposed to be a third Ghostbusters movie, it just never came together. But it’s a story that could be easily continued. Any reboot is going to be compared to the original and found wanting (even with hilarious women).

Now, it could be that they’ll do it right, and it’ll be a new classic. Maybe it’s just that Ghostbusters is special to me and I don’t want to see it touched.

But am I alone here? Am I the only person annoyed by unnecessary reboots?