Why is cinema obsessed with remakes?

The game is afoot! Yes, yet again! Hot on the hob-nailed heels of Enola Holmes, the Netflix film about the great detective’s younger sister, comes yet another spin on Sherlock.

This time the streaming service brings us The Irregulars, a gaggle of Victorian urchins hired by Dr Watson to investigate crimes with a supernatural element.

Elementary, you might say. Though I won’t, because it’s so tired and clichéd. And this convoluted Conan Doyle cash-in isn’t just jumping the shark — the producers of The Irregulars are so far gone, they’ve cleared the wall of the orcas’ tank and have beached themselves in the carpark.

‘Whatever is it like in your funny little brains?’, as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock said. Or was it Robert Downey Junior? Or Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone or any of the good detective’s 250-plus screen appearances?

For Hollywood, familiarity breeds anything but contempt. Emma Stone is about to hit our screens as Cruella de Vil in a prequel to 101 Dalmatians. The Handmaid’s Tale season four drops at the end of April. Paddington 3 is currently in the early stages of development, though the director of the first two instalments, Paul King, won’t be at the helm this time. He’s busy directing Wonka, about the origins of the eccentric confectioner (last seen in Tim Burton’s remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

Depressingly, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, known for the startlingly original Fleabag and Killing Eve, is re-making Mr and Mrs Smith, the 2005 movie best-known for the propagation of Brangelina. This rather tired trope, of married assassins hired to kill each other, has already been mined for three separate outings. (It first appeared in a 1996 series and was revived in a 2007 pilot movie that didn’t get green-lighted.) The question many fans want to ask Waller-Bridge, the woman who gave us #sexypriest is #why?

The remake and the reboot has become a trope of filmmaking in itself. This cannibalisation and endless recycling of material isn’t new, but it has become increasingly prevalent with the market surely close to saturation.

In the past 20 or so years there’ve been 13 variations on a theme of X-Men, the six new Star Wars movies plus at least two spin-offs and now The Mandalorian on Disney+ with six new live-action series planned. Disney has milked the cash cow of Star Wars shamelessly since acquiring the franchise in 2012. The company also has more than a dozen live-action remakes of Disney classics in the pipeline, including a Lion King sequel.

Warner Bros squeezed two movies out of the final Harry Potter book and managed to eke three out of The Hobbit, which brings to mind what Tolkien’s friend Professor Hugo Dyson allegedly said of an early draft of The Lord of the Rings: 'Oh no. Not another f**king elf.'

For the discerning viewer, remakes and sequels are at best the law of diminishing returns (Saw 8, Friday 13th vol. 12); taking a once sleek, winning racehorse and flogging it until it is a debased, putrefying pulp.

At worst they’re offensive, risible and set up to fail. The 2008 film of Brideshead Revisited was only ever going to be banal and vapid in comparison with the iconic 1981 Granada TV series. Nicolas Cage himself conceded that the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man, one of the most influential horror movies of all-time, was “absurd”; a film so bad, it was nominated for five Golden Raspberries but failed to win a single one.

There is, granted, the odd game-changer, such as Black Panther somewhere in the fug of the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Zzzzzzzz (23 movies to date, another 14 in various stages of development including — yep, you’ve guessed it! — Black Panther 2).

Sequels and re-hashes aren’t without their benefits (I happily put my two young sons in front of one of the many, many Lego movies in order to write this tirade on unoriginal ideas).

But perhaps, at a time of such uncertainty, we crave the familiar. Certainly, I’ve found watching The Go-Between (the 1971 film starring Julie Christie, NOT the recent BBC adaptation) as soothing as my children will no doubt find The Lion King 2.

Then again, is there any such thing as an original idea? The 1994 animated Lion King is based on Hamlet, while Shakespeare himself (with a couple of exceptions) pinched most of his plots.

In his magisterial study, The Seven Basic Plots (the product of 34 years’ research), Christopher Booker proved comprehensively that there are only a small number of basic stories in the world. But it’s deeply depressing that risk-averse studios interpret this so literally.

As Christopher Lee, who played Lord Summerisle in the original Wicker Man (1973) said of the Nicolas Cage version, 'to remake a movie with such history and sense just doesn’t make sense to me.'

That one flopped at the box office, but the majority of regurgitated movies don’t. Marvel is the highest-grossing franchise ever, with worldwide box office revenue of more than $22 billion US dollars.

That’s followed by Star Wars ($10.2 billion), Harry Potter ($9.18 billion) and James Bond ($6.89 billion).

Consider that the delay of Bond 25, No Time to Die, brought down the curtain on the Cineworld chain and you appreciate the deep-pocketed clout of the reboot.

'Show me the money,' as Phoebe Waller-Bridge might have said. Hang on — surely it’s time Jerry Maguire had a re-boot?