Learning from Hollywood's remakes

Have you noticed that cinema and TV today is dominated by remakes, sequels and spin-offs?

In the months before Christmas, we’ll see Moana 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Gladiator 2 and Mufasa: the Lion King. Then 2025 will bring us the eighth Mission Impossible movie, another Avatar film, a new version of the Fantastic Four – I could go on. In 2026, a remake of The Goonies is even set to be created, 40 years on from its release!

This has been increasingly the case for years, but we’ve now reached a point where, according to news website cnbc.com, ‘between 50%–70%’ of the top studios’ 2025 movies will come from existing intellectual property.

It’s not hard to guess why – these kinds of films are a safe bet in a financially precarious time. People will tune into a Lord of the Rings prequel even if it’s terrible, because they loved the Lord of the Rings and are aching to get that feeling back. I’ll be honest, my inner 12-year-old is buzzing that there will be a Princess Diaries 3 next year, and it would take a lot to convince me not to watch it. In other words: nostalgia sells.

What is nostalgia? The Oxford Dictionary describes it as ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past’. But writer C.S. Lewis had a different definition. In his famous essay The Weight of Glory, he said that nostalgia isn’t longing for a film we loved, a relationship we once had or a time in our lives – but for something else. He said that if we’re able to go back to that moment in the past we’re longing for, we’d be disappointed – we ‘would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it’.

He continued: ‘The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are … not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.’

Nostalgia, he says, is actually a longing for a relationship of ‘acceptance’ and ‘welcome’ with our God. That relationship is ‘the thing itself’.

Hollywood’s dependence on nostalgia reveals three things about this longing for a relationship with God:

1. It’s powerful. The movie industry plays on nostalgia not to make their millions, but their billions. Of the top 20 highest-grossing American releases of 2024, only two are thought to be original content – Paramount’s IF and Neon’s Longlegs (CNBC). This ‘nostalgia’, this longing for God, isn’t a faint feeling; it’s an incredibly deep and driving emotion.

2. It’s universal. Nostalgic films succeed financially because of the sheer number who turn up to watch. This deep, powerful hunger for God is in us all, no matter our background or experiences – it’s the human condition.

3. It will always be there. Films that play on nostalgia will always do well, because they aren’t dependent on cultural shifts, global changes, or fashion trends – our need for God isn’t going anywhere. We will always feel that deep longing until we are with the One who can truly satisfy it.

Isn’t this good news? If our nostalgia is really a longing for God, then that means we’re actually living in the prequel, the copy, the echo – the real thing is ahead of us and not behind. For Christians, nostalgia stops being a sad and regretful thing and becomes exciting.

The childish joy we get remembering the Disney movie we loved – we will feel that again one day. The cosy feeling we associate with seeing our favourite sit-com for the first time – we will feel that again one day. The excitement we had anticipating the next instalment in a book or TV series – we really will feel that again one day.

Through Jesus, we will one day see and be with the One who is the source of all these joys. As it says beautifully in 1 Corinthians 12:13: ‘For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.’

David Gibson puts it like this in his book Living Life Backward, ‘Wise people who understand how God has made us to long for Him and for heaven don’t look backward when they get nostalgic. They allow the feeling to point forward. They look up to heaven and to home.’