While ‘rebooting’ is a new term, remaking classic stories in a new medium is hardly new.

For example look at the history of Les Miserable in American medium. Though only published in novel 1862 by 1897, ‘Victor Hugo et les principaux personnages des misérables’, a short film by the Lumière brothers had come out.

Now we can say that this is a normal adaptation of a popular novel into a movie, just like Hunger Games and Bird Box.

But then in 1905 and 1909 four more short films came out, and again in 1913 a theater adaptation called ‘The Bishops Candlesticks’ - which only takes part of the novel, much like ‘The Great Comet’ did with War and Peace.

This story also goes beyond the theater and film, and into comics and radio (personally I recommend the 1937 Orson Wells production).

Then, for the next 100 years, every 3-5 years another adaptation comes out, culminating in this years BBC production - which is already getting grief from fans who primarily know the 1980 musical.

Some of these are obviously homages to the book- but there are others who are simply taking the shortened plot points from earlier films, which in my opinion- would place them firmly in the reboot category.

It greatly depends on how you define reboots.

Production quality was low in early film. Master films could could only have a limited number of copies produced. So if a particular film was popular after its first run, actors would be brought back in and the scenes reshot, remaking the same movie so as to create a new clean master copy. As actors were used to live stage performances anyway no one thought the reshoots to be odd. The idea of a definitive version was something that took a while to settle in. A lot of the surviving early films have multiple variants because of this practice.

Likewise early film copyright was often treated loosely and different directors often tried their hands at the same film. After Edwin Porter made the revolutionary The Great Train Robbery in 1903, it proved so popular that Siegmund Lubin filmed and released his own version of The Great Train Robbery in 1904, which was a practically a shot for shot remake.

Officially the first full length feature to be remade would be The Squaw Man which was made in 1914, remade in 1918, and re-re-made as a talkie in 1931 all by Cecil B DeMille. And several famous early films are themselves remakes. The great Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon was the third retelling of that classic Sam Spade tale. While the famous 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz was the tenth version to adapt that book.

Basically remakes, reboots, relaunches, adaptations and the like are as old as the medium. And popular properties have been tackled many many times.