As long as Hollywood insists on rebooting its old franchises over and over again, some of them need to be led by women.

Today, Amazon announced their intention to pick up what is to be the fifth adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series. The show will star John Krasinski, who follows in the footsteps of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine.

And look, I love John Krasinski. I think we need more John Krasinski-led movies and TV shows in our lives. But come on. Casting him as Jack Ryan is just pandering to the John Krasinski fanbase.

Now, don’t think I’m a John Krasinski hater. In fact, a lot of my friends are John Krasinskis. I’m all for John Krasinski-led projects, but isn’t it time for John Krasinski to get his own original scripts? Doesn’t it actually hurt John Krasinskinism that Hollywood can’t even give him a story that allows him to express the authentic John Krasinski experience?

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Look, here’s the thing. Our entertainment industry is based on telling the same stories over and over again. Heck, it’s what defines the Western storytelling tradition, if you subscribe to the theory that all heroes’ journeys are just repetitions of the King Arthur monomyth.

Hollywood feeds off remakes, sequels, spinoffs and adaptations. And, although it feels a lot more oppressive recently, it’s always been this way: Lots of ‘classics’ you celebrate as being untouchable — from the 1939 Wizard of Oz and the 1984 Ghostbusters to the more recent Ocean’s Eleven and Bourne Identity — are actually just remakes of movies that already existed. Sometimes remakes supersede the originals and go down in history as the ‘real’ version, but most of the time they don’t.

That doesn’t stop Hollywood from pumping out half a dozen King Arthur and Robin Hood movies a decade, as they stubbornly continue the James Bond, Indiana Jones, Terminator, Fast and Furious and Die Hard franchises well past their expiration dates.

We accept this. We accept that, while most of the reboots are pretty tame, sometimes a sequel/remake is actually amazing (just look at Mad Max: Fury Road — which low-key genderbent the franchise, no less). And yes, sometimes an original idea strikes gold, too — Inception, Interstellar and Gravity are recent examples — but it’s a 50/50 chance at best.

We can complain all day about the never-ending stream of Disney reboots, and yet we keep flocking to the familiar. Both Cinderella and The Jungle Book broke box office records, while Tomorrowland — one of the most high-profile original stories in recent years that had a female protagonist — lost money. We may say we want new stories, but our wallets say otherwise.

And, at the end of the day, the box office is all that matters.

The past few years have seen the release of new Star Trek and Star Wars films, new seasons of Gilmore Girls, Full House and The X-Files, new Ghostbusters, Terminator, Batman, Jurassic World, Independence Day, Men in Black, 21 Jump Street, and so on; different stories that aren’t too different, but still feel fresh.

It doesn’t take a lot of deep thinking to realize that the current political climate only increases our demand for entertainment that feels safe and familiar. The scarier the real world gets, the more we tend to seek comfort in our fiction. So why on earth should we suddenly expect Hollywood to start taking more risks with original projects (led by ‘risky’ non-white-male protagonists, no less) when nostalgia is such a goldmine?

And this is exactly why the chief argument against female-led remakes of traditionally male-driven stories — that it’d be ‘much better’ if women were given ‘new’ heroes to root for, in ‘new’ franchises — is bullshit.

Because yes, of course we need new heroes in new stories. But that’s not a gender-specific problem.

As long as reboots and remakes continue to drive the Hollywood box office, we simply have to stop being so anal about preserving the gender, race and sexuality of an ancient character that has literally been modernized in every other possible way.

Related: J.K. Rowling slams down haters who think Hermione can’t be black

So give us original, awesome female and/or POC heroes. But since Hollywood is gonna continue to rehash all those old stories anyway, why not also let a woman lead a Star Wars film, or cast a black actor to play James Bond? After all, no actor after Sean Connery is the ‘right’ James Bond anyway, right? Why should skin color be the only disqualifying factor? Because the world wouldn’t have accepted a black James Bond in 1953 when the character was first invented? That’s a really, really racist (and stupid) reason.

And we don’t even need to gender or race-bend any existing characters. Ironically, neither Ghostbusters nor the upcoming Ocean’s Ocho gender-bend anybody. Rather, they introduce new characters into familiar worlds, allowing a new kind of audience to cast themselves as the heroes without erasing the ‘original’ (read: rebooted, see above) characters.

Believe me, I’d love to see a movie about female ghost-hunters or con artists that didn’t need a brand label slapped on the cover to sell tickets. I’d love to live in a world where an original female-led movie franchise could be expected to sell as many tickets as an Indiana Jones reboot. I’d love more original content, full stop, but Hollywood doesn’t work that way.

As long as Hollywood is intent on reviving old franchises, we simply can’t reserve all the major blockbuster roles for actors who happen have Caucasian parents and/or a penis.