This is what happens when a movie sits on the shelf too long.
When MGM’s remake of John Milius’s 1980s military fantasy Red Dawn was shot in 2007, the production switched out the Cold War Soviet Union invasion forces for ones from communist China. But in the two years or so that the finished film has been sitting on a shelf waiting for the studio’s financial crisis to resolve, the world carried on. And in those two years, China became one of the biggest foreign consumers of US entertainment product. So rather than risk offending literally over a billion potential customers, filmmakers are giving the film a digital makeover, changing the invasion forces from Chinese to North Korean ones.
The LA Times is reporting that filmmakers –
are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from “Red Dawn,” substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.
Why does that reasoning remind me of the old joke about how it is OK to go on TV and make fun of the Amish because they’ll never know?
The digital redo will reportedly less than $1 million which seems like a reasonable investment if it is going to help insure that the film gets distribution in China. When the film was originally announced, it was met with some criticism from China for being cast as the villains.
The Times piece has producer Tripp Vinson commenting –
We were initially very reluctant to make any changes. But after careful consideration we constructed a way to make a scarier, smarter and more dangerous Red Dawn that we believe improves the movie.
Smarter? Then hopefully they’ll have a really good explanation as to how a country about the size of the state of Pennsylvania could invade and occupy the the rest of the country.
