Vanity Fair has unveiled the cover of its upcoming issue featuring a beautiful Annie Leibowitz photo of characters new and old from Star Wars: The Force Awakens along with a big tease to the magazine's new story about the film.
The cover looks great, and we do want to read that story, but there is one huge problem with that clever "The Empire Reboots" headline: Star Wars: The Force Awakens is NOT a reboot.
While Vanity Fair are not the first ones to make this mistake, they're definitely the only ones who blew it up in huge letters and put it on the cover of a glossy national magazine.
We need to nip this in the bud right now, people. If we let this go unchecked, pretty soon people will be referring to all sequels as reboots, kind of like the way your mom refers to every photo taken with a smartphone as a "selfie" even when it is definitely not a selfie. Is that the world you want to live in?
So let this serve as notice. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi that continues the same storyline and features many of the same actors, is not a reboot. The 2009 Star Trek, also directed by JJ Abrams, which started the franchise's whole story over from the beginning with new actors and a new look was a reboot. Pretty much the only reason the term reboot exists for movies is to differentiate them from regular sequels.
