Road House, which premieres on Amazon Prime on March 21, will reintroduce audiences to Dalton, a bar bouncer with a philosophical bent, originally played by Patrick Swayze in the 1989 film of the same name. So, is it a remake or a reboot? In broad terms, a remake is a film in which most of the same events, characters, and plot points from an earlier film are repurposed. A reboot, on the other hand, can maintain very little rudimentary elements of the film that inspired it, taking only a bare minimum to proceed in a different direction. A reboot can also differ from a remake in one additional, crucial way: Reboot implies that a franchise is being reworked and updated in the hopes of churning out additional installments. Reboots carry brand recognition, which is why studios rely so heavily on them.
