What is Remediation? Definition, Meaning and Examples in Film

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Published: May 27, 2024 | Last Updated: November 18, 2025

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin popularized the term in their 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media. In it, they explore how new media derive their cultural significance by paying homage to and sometimes improving upon older media.

To understand remediation, you need to look at how content changes across different platforms. Each medium has its own strengths and limits; what works in a book may not work the same way in a film or game.

Types of Remediation

When you want to be more specific in your movie analysis, you can divide re-mediation into adaptation, remake, and transmedia storytelling.

Adaptation

Adaptation is when a story moves from one medium to another. It’s one of the most common types of remediation, like turning a novel into a film or a video game into a TV show.

Example: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series started as a popular book series and was later adapted into a highly successful film series.

Remake

A remake is a new version of an old movie or show. It usually keeps the same basic story but updates the style, setting, or characters to fit modern culture or technology.

An example is the remake of Ocean’s Eleven (2001), which originally was a 1960 film.

Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia storytelling extends a narrative across multiple media platforms, allowing different parts of the story to be told differently.

This can be seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), where stories are told across films, television series, comic books, and video games (e.g., Avengers: Endgame, 2019).

Theoretical Perspectives

Bolter and Grusin discuss two key concepts in re-mediation: immediacy and hypermediacy.

Immediacy

Immediacy aims to make the audience forget the medium and focus solely on the content, striving for transparency:

“[…] immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly. In its psychological sense, immediacy names the viewer’s feeling that the medium has disappeared and the objects are present to him, a feeling that his experience is therefore authentic.”

Bolter and Grusin, in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), p. 70.

I’d argue that immediacy is closely tied to the strive for creating immersive experiences, such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 3D movies, first-person video games, photorealistic graphics in video games, and IMAX Dome movies.

It’s also interesting that novel technologies often have the opposite effect—at least initially. The technology built for immersion (letting us forget the media) is so interesting that that is all we focus on; “wow, look at the photorealistic graphics in The Lion King live-action movie.”

If my argument is correct, there is a transition from immediacy to hypermediacy as the particular technology becomes common.

See also authenticity.

Hypermediacy

Conversely, hypermediacy is aware of and emphasizes the medium itself, often layering multiple forms of media to enrich the narrative experience on a single surface.

Hypermediacy is described as

“[…] hypermediacy is opacity – the fact that knowledge of the world comes to us through media. The viewer acknowledges that she is in the presence of a medium and learns through acts of mediation or indeed learns about mediation itself…[I]t is the insistence that the experience of the medium itself an experience of the real.”

Bolter and Grusin, in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), p. 70-71

Examples include computer interfaces and operating systems, which include multiple focus points – from windows to drop-down menus, icons, and more. Also, news websites and social media feeds often have multiple media layers, including text, images, videos, and live feeds, making users constantly aware of the diverse forms of media they consume.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) is a good movie example that explores this somewhat. It uses comic book and video game aesthetics, including on-screen text and visual effects, to remind the audience of its multimedia origins.

See also the concept of “breaking the fourth wall,” which also brings attention to the media.

Aesthetics and Fidelity

The aesthetic choices made during re-mediation also impact our perception. Fidelity to the source material is often a point of contention.

For instance, fans of the graphic novel Watchmen had mixed reactions to its film adaptation (Watchmen, 2009), which strived to stay true to the original material while making necessary changes for cinematic effect.

Challenges and Considerations

Different media have unique technological constraints that can affect how content is adapted. For example, a book’s extensive internal monologue may need to be visually represented in a film, posing creative challenges for screenwriters and directors.

Also, different media have different audience expectations. A novel’s audience might appreciate detailed world-building and internal character thoughts, while a film audience might want visual awesomeness and pacing.

Summing Up

Remediation is when a new medium reshapes an old one. Bolter and Grusin explain it as a way new media borrow, change, or build on earlier formats. A movie based on a book, or a comic turned into a video game, are examples.

It works in two ways: sometimes the new version tries to hide the medium (like a game that feels real), and sometimes it shows it off (like a comic-style movie with bold colors and panels).

Remediation tries to keep the core idea but uses the strengths of the new format. That can mean adding interactivity, visuals, or sound. But it also creates problems, like how to show a character’s thoughts from a novel in a film, or how to copy a comic’s look in motion.