Blessed with the tagline “This time it’s really really personal”, Jaws 19 is the “holofilm” playing at Hill Valley’s Holomax cinema as Marty McFly wanders through the dubiously futuristic version of 2015 imagined in 1989 by the makers of Back to the Future Part II. As a meta joke about Hollywood’s then blossoming addiction to sequels, this gag held up pretty well for decades.
Luckily, the DeLorean never time-travelled to the real-world 2025, when the calendar markers might have proven a touch confusing. Cinemas are showing the original Jaws? We must be in 1975.
Re-releases have always been with us. The first film I remember seeing in a cinema was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and, unless I’ve totally lost track of time, that wasn’t in 1937, when Walt Disney first unveiled it.
Still, 2025 has delivered an extraordinary rash of anniversary-linked reissues, among them the original Back to the Future (1985), which you can now watch not in Holomax but in IMAX, and Jaws.
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The list also includes, but is not limited to, Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Sound of Music (1965), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Barry Lyndon (1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Breakfast Club (1985), Heat (1995), Clueless (1995), Before Sunrise (1995), Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Corpse Bride (2005).
Any film released in a year with a zero or a five at the end of it has enjoyed a fair shot of being shown on the big screen again in 2025, and if they first emerged a few months either side of those years, that’s no barrier either. Take Dogma, a religious satire released in 1999 to some controversy but even greater apathy. It’s back in Irish cinemas next Wednesday as Dogma: Resurrected! A 25th Anniversary Celebration – an event that seems solely designed to make me feel tired.
Was anything this Halloween as frightening as the re-release of all five Twilight films a hot minute after they were first in cinemas? None of them has reached the grand age of 20, but Stephenie Meyer’s original book was published in 2005, and that anniversary was deemed sufficient justification to invite the vampires back in.
All the films I’ve mentioned were, or are soon to be, widely distributed. Sprinkle your local cinema’s special seasons and “staff picks” on top, and the presence of new product in its soundproofed auditoriums will seem a lot thinner than it did before the pandemic – because it is.
[ Joel Edgerton: ‘I’ve always enjoyed playing and celebrating quieter characters’Opens in new window ]
A push to remaster old films in 4K is just one factor. Re-releasing the titles in cinemas helps pay for these projects and also markets them to a new audience. It’s a relatively cheap win for Hollywood studios with back catalogues of riches to plunder. Though maybe let’s leave it at that now, guys. Nobody needs a version of The Sound of Music with holographic nuns.
For exhibitors, anything that makes their forlorn cinemas seem a little less abandoned will be welcome. Happily, some of these reissues have done proper business, drawing in the young and curious alongside the not-so-young and nostalgic.
Not content with pioneering the concept of the summer blockbuster in 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws even managed to be the second-biggest film at the US box office on Labor Day weekend this August-September.
It’s a performance that speaks to the appeal and comfort of communal viewing. Who wants to endure those jump scares alone? But what it reveals more than anything else is the stubbornly sluggish state of film production in the wake of Covid interruptions, strikes and costly streaming wars.
A 50th-anniversary reissue should not be beating new releases into third and fourth place. A time-traveller from any period of Hollywood before this one would see this for what it is: evidence that something has gone very wrong with the pipeline, marketing and relevance of new films.
Re-release dependency shows no sign of easing off any time soon. But for a film to reach the anniversary of its run in cinemas, it has to have had a run in cinemas in the first place. In 2045 no one will be racing to see the 20th-anniversary reissue of some slab of awards bait that graced a handful of screens for a fortnight before beginning its new life as a thumbnail on the Netflix home page alongside Selling Sunset and documentaries about serial killers.
So much of this seems self-inflicted and self-defeating on the part of the studios. It’s almost as if you can see industry confidence drain away in real time. For cinema operators the bind feels even more painful. They’re waiting for Hollywood to get back to the future so they can stop relying on the past.
Cinemas shouldn’t be museums with popcorn. Entering them shouldn’t feel like a form of time travel for which a DeLorean is not required. If they start to seem that way, then it really is curtains.
