The Best Reboots And Revivals Of The Last Decade

We live in an age of franchises, be they big-screen shared universe blockbusters or small-screen continuations of things we fell in love with when we were kids. If it can be a franchise, there's a good chance it will be at some point, and if it already was a franchise, there's a good chance someone's already figuring out how to bring it back. 

This climate — in which virtually every reasonably successful piece of intellectual property will be mind at some point — means that we live in an age of revivals and reboots. The 2010s are full of them, from decades-in-the-making trips down memory lane to sequel TV series to stories that jump between mediums to try and get everything to connect. They're everywhere, which of course means that some of them are quite bad. Fortunately, a lot of them are quite good, and some of them are flat-out great. 

As the 2010s draw to a close, here are our picks for the best revivals of the decade on the big and small screens, in the order in which they were released.

The Hannibal Lecter franchise had already gone off the rails by the time Bryan Fuller came along thanks to the ill-conceived prequel attempt that was Hannibal Rising. The idea of yet another prequel seemed at first glance like little more than an attempt to leverage valuable IP. To make things even more questionable, a TV show about a cannibalistic serial killer and the FBI profiler trying to track him down was set to arrive on broadcast television, where it couldn't possibly ascend to the same gruesome heights as it might on the big screen. 

In the hands of any other showrunner, Hannibal might have been stale and unnecessary, but Bryan Fuller is not any other showrunner. In his hands, the NBC series starring Mads Mikkelsen in the title role became a beautiful, monstrous tapestry rich with metaphor, dark humor, and some of the most unforgettable gore effects broadcast TV is ever likely to see. Anchored by phenomenal performances from Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy as Will Graham, the series was one of the best things on television for its three years on the air, and proved that with the right approach Hannibal Lecter still has plenty of life in him. Here's hoping Fuller gets to revisit the character again one day.

It took 30 years after Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome for director George Miller to return to the post-apocalyptic, gasoline-fueled world of one of the most influential post-apocalyptic franchises ever. To say it was worth the wait was an understatement. 

Mad Max: Fury Road recasts the title hero as a near-supporting character in a story about a determined warrior named Furiosa (Charlize Theron) who's dreaming of a better life for herself and the women around her, who've been enslaved to the will of a deranged water-hoarding king of the wasteland. The plot is basically just a drive to a specific place and then a drive back, but in between Miller packs the film with two key things: Beautifully orchestrated character work, and breathtaking vehicular stunts and spectacle. The result is a two-hour car chase packed with unforgettable visuals, lines, and wordless moments of heart. Fury Road is not just one of the best franchise revivals of the 2010s. It's one of the best films of the decade full stop.

Many TV revivals seem expressly designed to give you exactly what you want with as few complications as possible. Bring back the original cast, maybe the original creator, and follow a lot of the same beats and trademarks that defined the show you remember loving so much. There's nothing wrong with giving people what they want, but it's not always the same as giving people what they need. Twin Peaks: The Return gave us what we didn't know we needed. 

Twin Peaks fans were ecstatic when it was announced that original creators David Lynch and Mark Frost would return to the iconic cult series for a new season, and even more ecstatic when it was revealed that the series would air on premium cable (which meant no content restrictions) and be directed entirely by Lynch (which meant the show's weirdness would be on full display). Even then, though, there was still a chance that network executives and the allure of nostalgia meant the series would play it safe. Lynch and Frost thankfully made sure that didn't happen. For 18 delirious hours in the spring and summer of 2018, fans were treated to a relentless onslaught of dark dreams, alternate realities, doppelgängers, and old friends presented in new ways. Twin Peaks: The Return is an uncompromising, truly visionary TV experience, and the most stunning TV revival of the decade.

The Halloween franchise had been around for four decades by 2018, and over the course of those 40 years had produced 10 feature films, only one of which didn't feature signature villain Michael Myers. The nine films that did feature Michael include one two-film remake series, a faked death, a retconned child, a secret identity, and a number of other twists and turns that Halloween fans lovingly chronicled for decades. 

Then Halloween 2018 came along and said that all of those many continuity quirks no longer mattered. The film made the bold choice to ignore every film that took place after John Carpenter and Debra Hill's original 1978 classic, even the sequel that took place on the same night. That could have been a death sentence for the film, but instead Halloween 2018 morphed into a meditation on trauma, legend, and cycles of violence that paid tribute to every previous film in the franchise while also praising a bold new path. Throw in Jamie Lee Curtis in a powerhouse return as Laurie Strode, and you've got a horror franchise with plenty of new life.

It took more than 20 years for Watchmen, the seminal comic book miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, to make it to the screen at all. After it finally did, via Zack Snyder's 2009 film adaptation, it seemed likely that would be the end of things, because Watchmen had existed largely unchanged since its publication. Then came DC Comics' Before Watchmen series of prequels, and that also seemed to be a relatively self-contained venture. Watchmen has always been, in its own way, a rather monolithic work, and the prospect of continuing its story beyond that original comic has always felt daunting. 

Which is why it was such a pleasant surprise to discover that the Watchmen TV series created by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) was not only intriguing, but flat-out brilliant. Conceived as both a sequel to the original comic (not Snyder's film) and a kind of remix of Watchmen's biggest ideas, Lindelof's TV series employs a diverse cast and a lot of very big ideas to tell a new story more than three decades after the original. Old characters are given new life, new characters get to dive into an old mythology, and the result is some of the decade's best comic book-inspired storytelling. It has no right to be this good, but somehow it is.