Franchises coming to film!

Two old properties getting the reboot to feature film in the works were recently announced:

Jem, which has Peter Barsocchini, a writer of High School Musical attached to the 1980s Hasbro property and is quite clearly a girls franchise...
...and the Berenstein Bears. While the Berenstein Bears are not ostensibly a "girls franchise" they certainly appeal to both genders, and often presented quite aspirational themes to girls, and touched on many issues near and dear to a young girl's heart without necessarily alienating their boy counterparts.

Walden Media CEO Michael Bostick says it's vital to honor the "goodwill from generations of families" who have enjoyed the books, but he compares the characters to other outcast families "like The Beverly Hillbillies or The Addams Family, who don't quite fit in but manage to survive."

The Berenstain Bears have existed as 2-D illustrations for so long, they are also getting "a slight makeover to bring it into the three-dimensional style, but we'll embrace the core design elements," Bostick says. "It'll be a slightly modern spin on their look."

So yeah... there's that quote. The Berenstein Bears were always part of their community, they lived in a world of other bears in which they dealt with pretty normal issues of growing up and being a family. I have to ask, do they need to be made into another fish out of water story? Haven't we all seen that before? I hope they manage to do something with the screenplay that doesn't seem like more of the same thing we've seen from the reboot of so many mid-twentieth century franchises.