Ka-pi96 said:
Firstly, you're German? :O Secondly, on this bit I don't think it's the case that movies like The Ring "had" to be remade. I think it's more hollywood being imperialistic and selfish about things, ie. if they make their own ripoff version of it then don't have to pay anywhere near as much in royalties (if any) to the original producers. They can steal the credit for something and take the lion's share of the money at the same time. It's definitely much harder for non-English language films to do well in English speaking countries than the reverse, but I don't think it's so difficult that it necessitates them being remade to see success. I do wonder if this is something that could change in the future though. Particularly with TV shows. You said we don't get things like Japanese TV shows airing which is very much true on network TV. I've noticed quite a few foreign TV shows have been picked up by Netflix though. They might start finding an audience now that it's actually possible to easily and legally view them. |
XD Yeah, I am. I lived in the UK until recently though.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love that we are slowly getting more foreign films and shows crossing over. And in the case of japanese film and TV that is a path that has been carved out largely by Anime.
And I think you're right about the motivations of Hollywood studios for remakes rather than dubs too, but I think it's a mixture of wanting to maximize profits and wanting to minimize cultural dissonance. All those 'woolsey' dubs were done for a reason. Calling Onigiri 'Burgers' or 'Cookies' and dropping honorifics goes beyond just smoothing out the translation and letting the dialog flow better, those are cultural 'translations' to make the foreign thing more digestable to a diffrent audience.
Were those neccessary? Probably not, but the attitude in the late 80's early 90's was definitely that cultural translation was needed to make Anime more accessible to western Audiences. Then, I'd argue with the advent of internet piracy, we discovered that a lot of the translations we'd been seeing were incorrect, or at least inaccurate and that's when more accurate translations started entering the mainstream. With that came a better understanding of japanense culture in general, making japanese film and TV more feasable.
That being said, today we definitely don't need those reboots anymore (if we ever needed them). No one needed that dreadful Netflix Death Note 'reimagining'....
