What's with all the reboots?

What's with rebooting everything recently? There's the reboot of the Spider-man movies despite the last one only being 3 years ago. There's also talk of a reboot of the Fantastic Four movies rebooting, perhaps as an attempt to keep the licence reverting to Marvel but allegedly because the two movies were a flop. Shame, I kinda liked them.

But I digress. Back to the topic - reboots happen for many reasons, but usually because the executives making the decisions are the right age to be nostalgic for a property and the audiences they're selling it to are the same. That's probably the secret behind the success of shows like the new Battlestar Galactica. Though the same argument could be made for why the new Bionic Woman should have succeeded, but I guess that's proof a reboot needs to be good as well as tap into nostalgia.

But where I think it may have gone too far is this new reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has every chance to be good, but that's not what has me puzzled. What I can't work out is why reboot a franchise that's only been off the air since 2003. It just doesn't seem nearly long enough for audiences to become nostalgic for the character. On top of that, the reboot only has the rights to the character of Buffy so none of the others from the show are going to appear in the new movie. So I was really puzzled.

But then the answer came to me: Twilight.

This has to be an attempt to muscle in on the market currently being sucked dry of it's lifeblood by Twilight. It makes sense that they'd do this, but it irks me a little to hear of the possibility of a character I spent 7 years watching to be turned into a Twilight rip off. Though by all accounts, this version of the character will be older - out of school and college apparently.

Which made me think that as much as I'm not liking what I'm hearing about the direction of the reboot - especially having the audacity to compare a script by an unknown to Christopher Nolan's Batman reboot - if they hire Kristen Bell to play Buffy, then all if forgiven. :)