THIS YEAR ALONE has seen action films led by Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford. You might have watched Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, Super Mario Bros. or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in cinemas. Coming up, there’s a new Ghostbusters movie, another Sonic The Hedgehog, another Karate Kid. Director Chad Stahelski is working on another Highlander; Taika Waititi is trying to make a new Akira; studios keep trying to make He-Man happen. Even aside from the regular attempts to reboot Die Hard, Predator and Terminator, the ’80s seems to exert an intractable hold on our collective imagination — but it’s time, maybe past time, to move on.
Some nostalgia is inevitable. Many of the people bringing back these characters, stars and franchises grew up in the 1980s and have strong feelings for those films, just as ’80s filmmakers often harked back to the 1950s (see: Back To The Future, Stand By Me, Dirty Dancing). You might expect ’90s nostalgia to have taken over, working on the same 30-year gap, but that hasn’t happened because the Boomers never retired, Gen X loves their childhood films and elder Millennials have yet to rise to the top. Cruise, Stallone and Ford are still leading films because we still turn out to see them, even if not, judging by Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Expend4bles and Indiana Jones And The
Dial Of Destiny’s box-office performances, in quite the same numbers as before.