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Hollywood deja vu: More reboots, sequels and remakes on the way

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Some days you read the trades and industry blogs and just throw up your hands and go, ‘Will anyone ever make an original movie ever again?’ Here’s today’s news as we slide into the Memorial Day weekend, where the box-office winner is expected to be another dismal sequel--’Sex and the City 2.’

Dimension Films made a casting announcement, saying that Emma Roberts and Hayden Panettiere were joining original cast members Courteney Cox and Neve Campbell in ‘Scream 4,’ a reboot of the aging horror franchise.

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Fox announced that James McAvoy is joining the cast of ‘X-Men: First Class,’ an origins version of the popular ‘X-Men’ franchise that is slated for release next summer.

Warners announced that it is moving ahead with a sequel to ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ which will hit theaters in mid-December 2011, with returning stars Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law and Rachel McAdams.

In fact, when Warners Chairman Barry Meyer laid out the studio’s 2011 slate for investors yesterday, it felt (to quote Yogi Berra) like deja vu all over again. The studio’s big releases were almost all remakes, sequels and revamps of other films, notably ‘The Hangover 2,’ ‘Green Lantern,’ ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II,’ ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth 2,’ ‘Happy Feet 2’ and ‘New Year’s Eve,’ which is a follow-up to the studio’s ‘Valentine’s Day’ hit.

Maybe it’s time to bring in some Wall Street hustlers to run the studio system, since its getting hard to tell the difference between a movie slate and a stock portfolio.

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