Hard reboots, soft reboots, remakes, legacy sequels… Hollywood uses many tactics to keep valuable IP alive. Yet those tactics have also made the definition of “reboot” fairly muddy. Mad Max: Fury Road stretches the limits of what we consider a “soft” reboot, in that director George Miller engineered it to fit into the franchise without erasing his original films. 2018’s Halloween is a soft reboot “requel” that also functions as a direct sequel, while Ocean’s 11 kickstarted a new series of successful films off a remake.But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, very few studios have the guts to wipe their franchise slate completely clean, start again, and actually get a good movie out of that effort, so today I’ll shine a light on the movies that pulled off the near-impossible and gave us a hard reboot truly worth watching.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});I’ll set aside my personal appreciation for certain reboots here. I quite liked 2016’s Ghostbusters, but I know I’m in the minority. Man of Steel is great to some, disastrous to others. I also genuinely enjoyed Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider effort compared to the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptations of that video game series, but its mixed reception keeps it off this list, and the same goes for Mortal Kombat.I could argue all those films are worth watching, but many would simply disagree, so let’s take a look at the real, solid-gold franchise reboot gems of the last 20 years…Casino Royale (2006)Casino Royale was definitely not a remake of the 1967 parody of the same name, though that was loosely based on Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book. Instead, this 2006 Bond reboot forged its own path, propelling Daniel Craig into the limelight as the new 007 in a franchise reboot that dispensed with most of the cheekiness and tropes of the previous films and reinvented the character for the 2000s.Fighting fan perception that he had been miscast as the suave secret agent, Daniel Craig shut up those doubters pretty damn quickly in his first Bond outing, which saw a more brutal 007 set out to take down terrorism financier Le Chiffre (a typically frightening Mads Mikkelsen) at a poker game at the titular Montenegro casino. Along the way, Bond’s genitals are tortured, and he manages to evade other attempts on his life, but is still hit with tragedy despite ultimately succeeding in his mission. This was a new Bond, a new style, and a new day for the franchise: a desperately needed fresh start that succeeded by shedding the cringier side of 007 and embracing a colder reboot that really paid off in the post-9/11 era of geopolitical nastiness.Batman Begins (2005)Who better to tackle a superhero franchise than Christopher Nolan, a man who could never knowingly put less than 100% into making something very silly, like a wealthy man dressing up in a rubber suit and beating up bad guys, into a very serious and dark matter indeed that felt true to some of the greatest DC Comics stories featuring the character? Gone were the comic book splashes, dark fantasy, and whimsy of the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher era when Batman Begins first came to town, replaced by a jaw-clenching Bruce Wayne in Christian Bale and genuinely terrifying villains in Liam Neeson’s bin Laden-esque Ra’s al Ghul and Cillian Murphy’s psychologically twisted Scarecrow. Batman Begins marked a whole new trilogy and style for the Caped Crusader, rebooting the franchise from its previously campy Batnipples and dizzy color wheel into a compelling arc for Bruce Wayne, whose attempts to heal from his childhood trauma were at war with his desire for vengeance and love, and although the film would later sit in the shadow of its sequel, The Dark Knight, it remains a solid reboot that finally got audiences to take Batman seriously.Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)After the original Apes movie series dwindled in the early 1970s, a panned remake followed much later in 2001. But its box-office success didn’t help to signal renewed interest in seeing those damned apes on the big screen anytime soon, and Fox went back to the drawing board. Eventually, 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes came from extensive behind-the-scenes tinkering. The work absolutely paid off, and the first film in the reboot trilogy found critical and commercial success.The film’s upsetting, altered origin story wisely begins earlier, in an all-too-human 2016, when a biotechnology company tests its Alzheimer’s drugs on chimpanzees. These scenes are upsetting and scary, with a female chimp rampaging and being shot to death, and her intelligent baby chimp, Caesar, later locked in a cruel animal shelter. Featuring a stellar motion capture performance from Andy Serkis that brought Caesar to life onscreen, and real emotional stakes between the character and the humans he grows up with, Rise builds logically toward the original films without feeling the need to dismiss them, even when deftly rebooting the universe and promising more profound depth to it in the future.Star Trek (2009)Rebooting Trek was no small feat, but J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman proved they were up to the task when they chucked out decades of memorable adventures in the final frontier and put their own spin on the Original Series characters for 2009’s Star Trek. Casting was half the battle. We didn’t really need anyone pretending they could do a good impression of William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy; we needed actors who could take the characters of Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc and make them their own, and Abrams found actors who could harness some of the original cast’s energy, yet were still dedicated to making the sci-fi hokum of the film’s “United Federation of Planets good guys vs alien villains” story fly.Where Star Trek fails a little as a hard reboot is in its decision to bring back Nimoy’s Spock with some timey-wimey space nonsense, but even that serves the story in its efforts to reboot the franchise by drawing a new timeline in the sand so that people who were only just getting into Trek understood that they could go back and check the old stuff out, or not. It was entirely up to the individual. Subsequent films and their issues may have ultimately derailed Abrams’ reboot series, but Star Trek worked on almost every level, surprising many who thought it would fail outright.Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)While many fans agree that Andrew Garfield was a great Spidey, his Amazing Spider-Man reboot movies felt like they were lacking crucial pieces of the superhero crowd-pleaser puzzle that would have made them truly memorable. Uneven pacing, underdeveloped villains, and a sense that Garfield was just a little too cool as Peter Parker undercut some great lead performances and a romance between Garfield and co-star Emma Stone that crackled on and off the screen. But when Tom Holland arrived to reboot Peter Parker in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Civil War, audiences immediately warmed to him and suspected he’d be one of the greatest casting choices ever made. That was later confirmed in his first reboot movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, where he managed to embody both the sadness of Tobey Maguire’s spin on the character and some of the coolness Garfield brought, while also putting his own stamp on Peter Parker’s wholesome and wide-eyed yet utterly awkward enthusiasm.Though Homecoming was mired in the MCU’s ongoing continuity, the movie kicked off a new era for Spider-Man that has become Sony and Marvel’s most financially successful series, proving a hard reboot can overhaul a franchise without bringing in legacy actors and storylines for nostalgia’s sake. At least, until No Way Home came along.Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)It may have been a disappointment at the box office, but that doesn’t make Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a bad movie. It’s certainly worth watching despite its failure to make a splash in theaters. Indeed, with no connections to the previous Dungeons & Dragons trilogy, Honor Among Thieves was wildly popular with critics who couldn’t have imagined it turning out to be such a terrific and funny reboot, and it still has fans crying out for a sequel today! The filmmakers and cast do a phenomenal job of capturing all the larks of role-playing fantasy game characters, including a cheeky bard played by an energetic Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez as a tough barbarian who is tired of putting up with him, Justice Smith’s pining sorcerer, and Hugh Grant on fine form as a smarmy rogue.With plenty of jokes and a heist structure that works for both the group and the story, Honor Among Thieves is a tremendously good time that puts the uniquely crap previous trilogy in the rearview and yells “hey, let’s have a great time!” It’s really unfortunate that not enough people wanted to play.The Batman (2022)Batman makes the list twice thanks to Matt Reeves’ 2022 reboot, The Batman, which not only had the unenviable task of trying something new after Christopher Nolan had impressed audiences with his own DC trilogy about the Caped Crusader, but also had to quickly follow Ben Affleck’s spin on the character from the DCEU’s muddled movies Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, which the actor had suddenly stepped away from due to various issues.Against all odds, The Batman successfully rebooted DC’s popular character yet again with a story about a younger Bruce Wayne, played by Robert Pattinson, whose real-life weirdness seemed to fit a stranger, more disconnected Wayne as he faced major comic-book villains in only his second year fighting crime in Gotham City. Colin Farrell’s hilarious Penguin juxtaposed nicely with Paul Dano’s squirrely, oddball villain, The Riddler, while the movie thoroughly embraced the noir detective angle of Bruce Wayne, rarely seen in previous live-action Batman movies. Tense and visually impressive, Reeves certainly understood the assignment with The Batman, and while the film’s reliance on exposition occasionally got in the way of its pacing, it was largely viewed as an excellent reboot that probably would have been followed up with several sequels by now, had it not been for big changes behind the scenes at both Warner Bros. and DC.The post The Best Movie Reboots That Were Actually Worth Watching appeared first on Den of Geek.