I never even heard of the term “reboot” until perhaps a decade ago. Reboot is a different animal from sequel. Reboot is a franchise starts over as if any previous movie(s) never existed.
That’s right. Reboot is the cinematic equivalent of a “mulligan”.
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Obama is trying the “reboot” the country.
Indeed. It seems to be a "trendy" Hollywood buzzword now so they use it to describe anything and everything related to a franchise. There was an article on here last week with a headline about an planned "X-Files reboot" that would reunite David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to reprise their X-Files characters on a new TV series. News flash, Hollywood, that's called a REVIVAL, not a "reboot". A reboot would be a totally different X-Files show that DOESN'T follow the canon of the old series and has NEW actors playing Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. The 2012 Dallas TV series was also a revival, it was basically "Dallas: The Next Generation"
I guess they love using the word "reboot" constantly because it must poll well with focus groups or something. Sounds better than remake, rehash, and rip-off, which is what most reboots sadly are. The vast majority of "reboots" in the last five years (Amazing Spider-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jack Ryan: Shadow Agent, etc.) have sucked.
They were big on using the word "reimagining" to describe crappy remakes that ignored the source material about a decade ago, I guess that fell out of favor since almost every "reimagining" was terrible (Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Steve Martin's The Pink Panther, etc.) and audiences learned to avoid them like the plague. The lone exception might have been the new Battlestar Galatica. I heard that was good but I'd have to check out the original for comparison.
Since the word "reboot" has now become meaningless in Hollywood, it is perhaps to film & TV what the word "RINO" is to GOP politics and the word "evangelical" is to U.S. religion.
(BTW, there already was a "Rings" movie that took place between The Ring and its sequel: