Back in the 70s, the group Gunhill Road wrote a song called “Back When My Hair Was Short.” The lyrics nostalgically described life in the 60s. Nice tune; I put it into airplay at my college radio station.
A few months later, Gunhill Road had their own hit with “Back When My Hair Was Short.” Thing was, they completely changed the lyrics to make it nostalgia for the 50s. Same tune, just set in an earlier time.
So the second, more successful version, was set earlier than the first version.
“Dark Shadows” had a few seasons set centuries earlier, in the same house and town during Colonial times, with the same cast playing their own ancestors.
The makers of the Morse series created a new one called Endeavour, all about him as a young policeman starting out. And likewise the Italian Montalbano series had a Young Montalbano spin-off.
Here’s an odd one. The first season of “Sledgehammer” (a sitcom about a gun-happy cop) ended with a nuclear explosion, killing the hero and everyone in his entire city. So when the series was unexpectedly not cancelled, the second season took place before the first one.
King Arthur films are never tied to a specific date, but they usually dress the knights in 13th Century mail or 15th Century plate armor. The 2004 version, starring Clive Owen, is set during the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Anglo-Saxon invasions. The TV film based on Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave was also set in this time period.
Hamlet movies can be set in many different times, but usually stick to Shakespeare’s AD 1600 dialog. Prince of Jutland, aka Royal Deceit, is based more on Saxo Grammaticus’ 12th Century writings.
When the Raven Flies takes the Glass Key/Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars plot and sets it in the Viking era.
I think you should remove “reboot” from the title. A reboot does not necessarily have to be the same story. And none of your examples are reboots. What you want is simply adaptations of a story set further in the past than the original.
Unfortunately, the only examples I can think of fail due to being one offs in a SF/Fantasy setting.
I believe that Mallory’s Arthur cycle is set during the end of the Roman empire, earlier than the source material, Geoffrey Monmoth’s Arthur (in his history of the Kings of Britain) which has Arthur set in the post-Roman-empire world. (But i admit, I’m having trouble pinning down the dates, and my memory from college classes may be faulty.)
There are several comic books that take modern comic book characters and place them in historical eras. Not time travel but a new version of that character native to that era.
I was just reading about Mary Poppins, and was reminded of this thread. The original Mary Poppins book was written and set in 1934. But the 1964 Disney movie was set in 1910.