'The Craft' Reboot Is Actually Not a Reboot at All

Maybe other reboots should follow suit.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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News of The Craft reboot has kept fans of the 1996 original quite busy with speculation since Sony's announcement last May. Would the reboot honor its source material with an equally playful take on supernatural horror, or would it crumble beneath its own nostalgia like other attempts at rebooting iconic '90s movies? Thankfully, no one has to ponder these questions anymore.

The new Craft will be a sequel that strategically picks up 20 years after the events of the first film, according to producer Douglas Wick. Wick, in an interview with HitFix Tuesday, put everyone's reboot blues to rest with some deets on the current status of the highly anticipated project. "I would say that we wouldn't so much call it a remake as a 'twenty years later,'" he said. "There will be callbacks to the original movie, so you will see there is a connection between what happened in the days of The Craft, and how these young women come across this magic many years later."

The currently untitled sequel will be "very much about now," Wick added, praising writer-director Leigh Janiak (Honeymoon)'s fresh ideas. "The same way you use a war movie to explore the psyche of men, you get to create a heightened world to explore the psyche of these women," Wick said. "And so that seemed like an opportunity that was ripe and a way to make a movie that would be very much about now. And of course, part of that was just finding a talent that felt like enough of a real talent that you'd really be interested in her interpretation of this kind of story now, and of course Leigh is exactly that."

As for the original Craft stars, at least one of them was kind of hoping the film would take a slightly different direction. "I honestly think a new witch story as opposed to—I'm a little over remakes in general," Rachel True told Complex. "Whether it's the movie I'm in or a movie I saw. I'm over the remake thing. But I get why they are doing it. People still talk about the movie 20 years later. They never made a sequel." A more interesting follow-up, True said, would be to focus on grownups as opposed to a new group of teenagers.

"As women, the girls in The Craft are in their power more as women, or I'll say for myself, personally, I am much more in my power and in control of myself or understand myself a million times better than when I was a teenager," True said. "I get why they are making it kids again, but I think there’s a missed opportunity there."

The cast of the Craft sequel hasn't been announced, though we can hope Wick's promise of "callbacks to the original movie" is just a really sly way of saying that original stars Rachel True, Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, and Neve Campbell will make an appearance of some kind. Certainly the film's 20th anniversary has them pumped for some supernatural nostalgia.

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