IT'S back ... that's Stephen King's It. And so is Blade Runner - it's returning too. Even the Maniac Cop (remember that 80s B movie) is heading back to our screens. We could be forgiven for thinking, when we look at the film schedule for the next year and see world of reboot, remake and redux, that Hollywood has run out of ideas. Of course, Hollywood has a long history of finding something good and making it again and again in different ways. But there's a reason we are now in peak reboot - because the production costs of a film today are so huge, studios want to deliver familiar brands, shows or movies that were hits back in the day, with the guaranteed box office lure of recognition and nostalgia. Truth is, we can't resist a good reboot. Here's our list of the top remakes and rehashes coming to our screens in the near future.

It

(Release: September 8, 2017)

We've seen Stephen King's crazed, sewer-dwelling child-eating clown-demon on the screens before. For many, Tim Curry's grotesque clown, from the 1990 television drama is the definitive monstrous Pennywise. But now a new clown is in town, in a film with BMX-riding kids, 1980s-style stranger danger fears, a Stranger Things vibe, and a Pennywise played by Bill Skarsgard, who looks stranger and more coyly threatening than the Curry incarnation. Director Andy Muschietti, who previously directed horror movie Mama, has said both he and Skarsgard had agreed that the clown needed to be a "more edgy and more layered character with stranger behaviour than people expect." Has It pulled it off? Well critic Christopher Orr has described it as "a solid but relatively conventional horror movie".

Flatliners

(Release: September 29, 2017)

Joel Schumacher's original thriller was one of those films that seemed to be the birth of something, starring as it did a list of soon-to-be-megastars, Keifer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon as a medical students experimenting with near death. A new version is set to bring the old premise back to life, with a gang of students trying it again, stopping their own hearts, as well as ours. The film is even set in the same medical university, where, it turns out, Sutherland is back in his old role of Nelson, now a professor. Is it a reboot? Is it a sequel? It's both at once. Ellen Page stars alongside Happy Valley's James Norton, Diego Luna and Nina Dobrev.

Blade Runner 2049

(Release: October 6, 2017)

When Ridley Scott created his murky neo-noir adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Android's Dream Of Electric Sheep, he reinvented the sci-fi film. Hence any film-maker tackling a new version is up against a challenge. But the vibe around about Dens Villeneuve's new visioning of a world in which humans exist alongside android replicants is good. Set thirty years after the 1982 original, the film follows Ryan Gosling as a replicant-hunting LAPD officer, who tracks down Harrison Ford's Deckard after he discovers a secret, long buried, and likely to send the earth into chaos.

Murder On the Orient Express

(Release: November 3, 2017)

One glance at the trailer suggests a key reason it was necessary to make yet another version of the Agatha Christie classic was a moustache reboot. Kenneth Branagh not only directs but also takes on the central role of Hercule Poirot, and it appears he's trying to dwarf all other versions of the detective with the sheer size of his hairy twizzle. Branagh has said that he knew the tache was important to Agatha Christie. He said in an interview: "She really does have every character respond to it." And, he points out, it was the one thing Christie found "a little bit disappointing" about the 1974 movie version of Murder on the Orient Express, which starred Albert Finney as Poirot.

Death wish

(Release: November 27, 2017)

Eli Roth's remake of Michael Winner's 1974 film stars Bruce Willis in the role of the vigilante formerly played by Charles Bronson and has already provoked controversy with the release of its trailer. Critics on Twitter and across the media have declared the film everything from "racist" to "nakedly fascistic". One even wrote: "Angry, old white man becomes an armed vigilante against Chicago civilians. That's a dangerous message. Is Death Wish alt-right fan fiction?" Part of the problem has been the shifting of the setting from New York to Chicago, a location now so politically loaded it is regularly the target of attacks by Trump, and frequently portrayed by the alt-right as an urban hell overrun by black gangs. Roth's response however has been that he remains proud of the movie. “When people see the movie in context I think this [controversy] is all going to evaporate."

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle

(Release: December 29, 2017)

The main complaint from fans about this reboot is that it isn't Jumanji because there isn't a board game in it. Nor is there the comic genius that is Robin Williams, who starred in the original. Here, instead, are four high-school kids who discover a video console in a school basement, choose their game characters, and find themselves flung into the world of Jumanji, in which they are not themselves, but their avatars, played by Jack Black, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Karen Gillan and Kevin Hart, and a whole lot of comedy about being in inappropriate bodies.

Tomb Raider

(Release: March 2018)

Times have changed. When Angelina Jolie hit the screens in 2001 as a cartoonish Lara Croft, it was the heyday of lad mags and Girl Power. But even then the video game inspired movie didn't go down a storm with critics. Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post wrote that it was "loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticised, flavourless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way". A concept to be consigned to the tomb of history? Or ripe for reinvention? The latter it seems, and, with director Roar Uthaug (creator of the Norwegian blockbuster The Wave) at the helm, Alicia Vikander's new Croft is set to be one that has the feel of what it is to be a "young woman in 2018".

Suspiria

(Release: 2018)

Most might like to call this new version of the Dario Argento 1977 horror classic a reboot or remake, since it's based on that bizarre and delirious original, and, like it, follows the story of a young dancer who comes to train in a European dance academy and finds it hides dark secrets. But star Tilda Swinton calls it a "cover". "We're not particularly keen on remakes," Swinton said, speaking for herself and director Luca Guadagnino. So, will this "cover" be anything like Argento's colour-saturated, dream-like horror? Not, it seems, on a tonal level. Guadagnino has said, the film, which also stars Dakota Johnson, "has no primary colours in its colour palette" and "will be cold, evil and really dark."

Hellboy

(Est release: 2018)

Based on the graphic novel, Hellboy - this reboot of the Guillermo del Toro 2004 original movie treatment - has already caused controversy. After it was criticised for whitewashing in its casting of Ed Skrein in the role of a Japanese-American character, Skrein pulled out. Tipped to be darker than the much-loved del Toro original, it stars David Harbour as the demonic beast turned superhero Hellboy, and Milla Jovovich as Nimue

Maniac Cop

(Est release: 2018)

There's something crazed in the mere idea of trying to reboot Maniac Cop, the 1980s slasher by William Lustig which is considered a kind of horrible classic of trash cinema. After all Slant Magazine described it as "the type of movie you want to watch through the slits in a sewer grate". But Nicolas Winding Refn, The Neon Demon director, and exploitation enthusiast, has pushed this project through, saying that he would reframe the movie from horror to "contemporary and realistic action thriller". However, as writer Katie Rife has pointed out on the website AV News, this "has the potential to be problematic, given that a realistic take on a uniformed police officer who kills people in cold blood is far less culturally acceptable in 2017 than it was in 1988."

Highlander

(In development)

There shall not be only one – in fact, a whole trilogy of Highlander reboots is planned, and there's even talk of Christopher Lambert reprising the role, somehow, of Connor MacLeod. Reboot director Chad Staheski, the man behind John Wick, is keen to retain some of the feel of the original 1986 cult film. He has said: "I can't see Highlander without Queen, without the Queen centre, without having Freddy Mercury, "Prince of the Universe" [a song from the soundtrack] and all this stuff. I can't picture the movie in my head without it."

Dune

(In development)

Dune rebooted might be one of those projects that carries a whiff of doom about it were it not that the director attached to it is Denis Villeneuve, the man behind the Oscar-nominated Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Previous adaptations of the Frank Herbert novel, after all, have seemed jinxed. David Lynch disowned his critically-mauled 1984 version. An attempt, in 1973, by Alejandro Jodorowsky failed so badly it resulted in nothing but a fascinating 2013 documentary. Enter Villeneuve: a visionary that can create the kind of atmosphere to bring Arrakis life. The director has said that he read Dune at 12 years old and that it is a film he has long hoped to make. "I have images that I am haunted by for 35 years.”

The Creature From The Black Lagoon

(In development)

Universal, like many studios, is reboot central, and their big current project is the remaking of a whole series of Monster movies from their back-catalogue. Among them is The Creature From The Black Lagoon, Jack Arnold's 1954 sci-fi horror, and one of the definitive Creature Features of that era, in which a group of scientists discover a dangerous pre-historic creature, part human, part fish, while on an Amazon expedition. But who will replace Julia Adams, the scream queen of the original film? Back in 2015, Scarlett Johansson's name was attached.

An American Werewolf In London

(In development)

Not just an ordinary reboot, but a remake by Max Landis, the son of the 1984 film's director, John Landis – who penned the original at the fresh age of just 19. And, who could forget the film, with its blend of horror and comedy, a brilliant soundtrack, brilliant cast, and startling transformational special effects? Will Landis Jr be able to live up to his dad? Stay off the moors...

Z

(In development)

The pulp hero, Zorro, may have been created n 1919, but he can do any context, even future Zorro. Set in a post-apocalyptic near future, this new episode in the life of the swashbuckler, will be directed by Jonas Cuaron, the son of filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, and will star Gael Garcia Bernal. Producer Mark Amin has said: “ Zorro is a hero who is charming, witty and clever. Gael possesses all those characteristic and he’s able to deliver them with a modern spin to introduce the Zorro character to a new audience.”

Men in black

(In development)

Ahem. Looks like they'll be needing a new title - for all we really know about the reboot of the franchise is that it's set to no longer be just about the men in black. There will, according to producer Laurie Macdonald, be a woman in black.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

(In development)

The first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was, let's face it, a ttotal turkey. It's said that Sean Connery was so disillusioned by his experience of making it that it prompted him to retire from acting soon after. BBC website writer Jamie Russell wrote that it was "destined to go down in the history books as the Heaven's Gate of superhero flicks... nothing less than an extraordinary waste of time and money". The reboot surely has to be better. Perhaps it's even necessary. In 2015, producer John Davis said that the intention was to go "back to the roots" of the Alan Moore comic book series, and make it "female-centric".

License to drive

(In development)

Time for the girls to get behind the wheel. In the original 1984, fairly unmemorable flick starring Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, a boy who fails his driving test goes out for a night of partying in his grandfather's treasured 1972 cadillac. The reboot twist here is a female central character, in the driving seat.

Escape From New York

(In development)

For many fans the cult 1981 John Carpenter movie is not to be messed with. No one could replace Kurt Russell's Snake, the eye-patched hero who battled to get out of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that had been turned into a maximum security prison. Russell, himself, when asked what he thought about the reboot, said: "Nothing is sacred. You just have to try to hopefully find a way to make a movie where it just makes sense why you did the remake – that's all."

Perhaps, though, the news that Carpenter is executive producer on the planned reboot, and Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City, is director, should be enough to inspire confidence. Anything is possible.

Strangers On A Train

(In development)

Yes, even Hitchcock is up for reboot – though this is hardly surprising since there's long been a trend for Hitchcock remakes, from Gus van Sant's Psycho to the recently made television series of Psycho. Ben Affleck and David Fincher announced in 2015 that they were following up Gone Girl with Strangers, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, which was the source for Hitchcock's 1951 film about two men who meet on a train and 'swap' each other's murders. This reboot is set to star Affleck as a film actor, offered a lift by a wealthy businessman after his private jet breaks down.