Hollywood now remaking... foreign movies?

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RevRaptor

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Lucius Ivanov said:
I thought they already made their take on "The Raid: Redemption" with the new "Dredd"(2012). Both take place in a similar scenario, an apartment building, and in both they climb up to the top floor to take care of the bad guy.

As how I feel about the practice.. well.. they milk a different cow and tell us that's the same one.

EDIT: Mixed the cows.. :D
Dread was made first.

Dredd was written and filmed long before The Raid. Dredd's screenplay was written in 2008 and leaked online in 2010. Principal photography on Dredd took place between November and December 2010. The Raid did not go into production until November 2010.

Neither ripped of the other.

As for my take on foreign movie remakes, if its good then yay but its so very rarely good. disappointment abounds :/
 

lechat

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been meaning to watch old boy for ages but never got the chance. watched the American remake and will prolly watch the korean version to compare.
 

dyre

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Yeah, Hollywood does it a lot, probably because a lot of the American audience doesn't think to look abroad for good films because the American film industry is so big. That said, so far in my experience the remakes are pretty well done, so I don't particularly mind.

Some stuff that comes to mind: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the remake of REC (forgot the American title), and The Departed. All of them were pretty well done, though in the REC example it was pretty much a shot for shot copy.

As some posters mentioned there's also an Oldboy remake, though personally I'm not interested in seeing it as Spike Lee is by far an inferior director compared to Park Chan Wook.

Dead Century said:
It's been happening for a long time.

A Fistful of Dollars = Yojimbo
The Magnificent Seven = Seven Samurai

Those are my two favourites.

When it works well, it's great. But I don't think every foreign film needs to be remade. They're doing a remake of Oldboy with Josh Brolin. I'm curious to see how that turns out.
Putting aside the inspiration/adaption vs remake issue that other posters are talking about, isn't A Fistful of Dollars a work of Italian cinema, not Hollywood?
 

Scarim Coral

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I's not exactly new since they had been doing that with J Horrors movie and suck at it. I suppose with the increase of remake on non J Horror films just shows they are running out of original ideas.

The only remake that I can think of that I actually liked was The Departed which is a US remake on the Chinese film Internal Affair. Sure the original was good but they had milked it out by making it into a triliogy which were mostly flashback (I can't remember) and seeing the alternative ending did make me wanted them to used it as the proper ending instead.
 

Zetatrain

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dyre said:
Dead Century said:
It's been happening for a long time.

A Fistful of Dollars = Yojimbo
The Magnificent Seven = Seven Samurai

Those are my two favourites.

When it works well, it's great. But I don't think every foreign film needs to be remade. They're doing a remake of Oldboy with Josh Brolin. I'm curious to see how that turns out.
Putting aside the inspiration/adaption vs remake issue that other posters are talking about, isn't A Fistful of Dollars a work of Italian cinema, not Hollywood?
Yep, there's a reason why they call it a "Spaghetti Western". Though I think the OP's main issue is why remakes seem to be coming out more frequently nowadays and he's just using Hollywood as a broad generalization of movie companies.
 

Parasondox

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rhizhim said:
Paradox SuXcess said:
Evening to you all,

Okay, the title may say now but I know it's already been happening but how do you feel about them now? This comes as news that the movie The Raid: Redemption, will now be remade via Hollywood. As I said before this practise isn't new but why does it happen often now? The original Raid is brilliant. Intense, perfectly shot and had a good story and a great watch mixed with action and suspense. Could Hollywood create that same magic? And that movie was made on a limited budget with an unknown leading actor. [REC], may favourite horror movie in the past 20 years was remade into Quarantine and that didn't really capture what the original had. District 13, one of the best french action movie will be remade into Brick Mansion and staring David Belle (the original lead from District 13) and the late Paul Walker.

So if you wish, you can list and rate any foreign movie that has been remade by Hollywood but also what do you think about the practice? Should they just leave the original alone or do you think they can pull it off?

Comment below and thank you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English-language_films_with_previous_foreign-language_film_versions
Thank you for the list, I will have to view it later once home and as I mentioned, I already know about the practice happening for decades and over half a century now. The title was just a bit strange I admit lol. Thank you.
 

Padwolf

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It has been going on for years and years. Some good, some great, some bad. To me the worst one is Quarantine. Gods it failed to capture everything the original had. They also copied it shot for shot and the acting was terrible. I found the atmosphere in the original to be incredibly creepy and unnerving. But damn Quarantine failed at grasping that.
 

Flutterguy

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It goes both ways and has for a long time. When hollywood remakes a movie it is just made safer and often without the charm that made the original stand out. When someone knocks off hollywood movies they tend to either be sad copies or brilliantly improved, Turkish Star Wars is a fairly well known of a bad copy and Spanish Dracula a good (but dated) example of improvement.
 

Ihateregistering1

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As you and others already pointed out, this is nothing new:

Last Man Standing=Yojimbo
A Fistful of Dollars = Yojimbo
The Magnificent Seven = Seven Samurai
Oldboy=Oldboy
For those who've read about it, a great deal of the original Star Wars was actually inspired by a Japanese movie called "Red Castle"

Anyhoo, what's especially weird about this news though, is the timing. "The Raid" is only what? 2.5, 3 years old? That's ludicrously fast to be remaking or rebooting anything. Not to mention, what made The Raid good had nothing to do with the story or the writing (it was a pretty simple story), it was the action sequences, so unless the director thinks they can do better than that, leave it the hell alone.
 

cathou

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Johnny Novgorod said:
I think a lot of foreign remaking comes from a desire to repeat a film's success for your audience back home, assuming people cannot tolerate different languages or reading from the subtitles or simply won't go watch a movie if nobody they know is acting in it.
i can only talk for french language, but we dub american movies, and pass it on movies theatre without any problem. it's mostly american that remake movies instead of dubbing them, not that often the other way around. but of course for that you need talented dubbing actors and writers. maybe we developped that more than the americans does...


anyway, we had a few movies that have been remake, mostly with very poor results. delivery man(2013) was a remake of the movie starbuck. i didnt saw it, but apparently, it was not to distant from the original, but it wasnt a very good movie.

EdTV was a total disaster that only kept a faint link with the original. Louis 19 was so much better if you ever have the chance to see it.

from France, just visiting, taxi, Nikita and jungle to jungle were really below the original. diner for schmucks was not that bad actually.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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cathou said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
I think a lot of foreign remaking comes from a desire to repeat a film's success for your audience back home, assuming people cannot tolerate different languages or reading from the subtitles or simply won't go watch a movie if nobody they know is acting in it.
i can only talk for french language, but we dub american movies, and pass it on movies theatre without any problem. it's mostly american that remake movies instead of dubbing them, not that often the other way around. but of course for that you need talented dubbing actors and writers. maybe we developped that more than the americans does...


anyway, we had a few movies that have been remake, mostly with very poor results. delivery man(2013) was a remake of the movie starbuck. i didnt saw it, but apparently, it was not to distant from the original, but it wasnt a very good movie.

EdTV was a total disaster that only kept a faint link with the original. Louis 19 was so much better if you ever have the chance to see it.

from France, just visiting, taxi, Nikita and jungle to jungle were really below the original. diner for schmucks was not that bad actually.
In Argentina they usually show movies both subbed or dubbed, depending what time of the day it's showing (the earlier movies are dubbed while latter day movies are subbed). Kiddie movies are usually just dubbed. The only kiddie movie I remember having a subtitled version was Toy Story 3 and that would be because it was marketed to an older audience as well.

I actually kind of liked the remake of La Cage aux Folles by the way. But whenever I watch an American remake of a French movie the result is always the same - they get the premise right and then fuck everything else. The humor in particular comes from a very different source but that's just a matter of taste.
 

Ihateregistering1

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delta4062 said:
Ihateregistering1 said:
As you and others already pointed out, this is nothing new:

Last Man Standing=Yojimbo
A Fistful of Dollars = Yojimbo
The Magnificent Seven = Seven Samurai
Oldboy=Oldboy
For those who've read about it, a great deal of the original Star Wars was actually inspired by a Japanese movie called "Red Castle"

Anyhoo, what's especially weird about this news though, is the timing. "The Raid" is only what? 2.5, 3 years old? That's ludicrously fast to be remaking or rebooting anything. Not to mention, what made The Raid good had nothing to do with the story or the writing (it was a pretty simple story), it was the action sequences, so unless the director thinks they can do better than that, leave it the hell alone.
The Raid released just under 2 years ago and the American version was planned before this one was released.
So Hollywood was already planning a remake before they even saw how well the original did with American audiences? That's even more bizarre.
 

Thaluikhain

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cathou said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
I think a lot of foreign remaking comes from a desire to repeat a film's success for your audience back home, assuming people cannot tolerate different languages or reading from the subtitles or simply won't go watch a movie if nobody they know is acting in it.
i can only talk for french language, but we dub american movies, and pass it on movies theatre without any problem. it's mostly american that remake movies instead of dubbing them, not that often the other way around. but of course for that you need talented dubbing actors and writers. maybe we developped that more than the americans does...
Yeah...going to go off in a very broad generalisation here, but it seems that USAliens need movies to be about USAliens more than most people need movies to be about them, so they redo movies and set them at home, rather than watch the originals.

I still half want to see the movies of Harry Potter set in the US that they wanted to make, but Rowling said no.
 

Mrkillhappy

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*cough*ringu, juon, one missed call, and godzilla *cough*
My point is Hollywood has been doing this for a while so I don't even see how this is news. Also some of the remakes such as Magnificent Seven were actually good in their own right so I don't like making prejudgments.
 

Raikas

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Aside from the already-mentioned point that this has been going on for decades, I'd ask "So what?".

Remaking a film in another language isn't fundamentally different from remaking a film for any other reason - it may be worse (or unfairly judged to be worse by people into nostalgia), but there's nothing that says that it can't be just as good or better.

The issue with something like the recent remake of Oldboy isn't that it's a remake, it's that it does a poor job of changing the setting. Something like that would have worked better if they'd changed more of it to fit the setting rather than being as close to the original as it was - translating a movie should mean more than just changing the location and language, it needs to shift the context as well (that's something the samurai/cowboy/space-opera translations did right back in the day).
 
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At least Hollywood is getting better at their rip-of... I mean inspirations. David Fincher's 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' was quite good and 'Let Me In' was almost as good as 'Let The Right One In'. That said, any American rip-off of The Raid can go hang itself. I'd be surprised if The Rock wasn't in it People's Elbowing bad guys through floors.