Hollywood To Remake Indonesian Action Movie The Raid
Seriously, what is up with remake fever? I genuinely don’t understand. Every single time a big Hollywood studio announces a remake, you hear an outcry from fans of the original, are these people not listening? Or are they just plain out ignoring us? Or could it be that cash is louder than our words? Either way, can they for once just listen to what the general populace wants? Remakes are fail, they need to understand that. I guess the studios just think they know what we want, thereby going over our heads like parents, like Andy Hendrickson suggested recently.
Either way, we have THE RAID, a new action film straight out of Indonesia that’s already getting major awards at the TIFF and just looks majorly bad-ass, based on it’s red band trailer released recently, is already being prepped for the American market. The Hollywood Reporter says that Screen Gems has already entered into negotiations for a remake for Sony Pictures, who bought the rights to distribute it in the US, even though Sony had previously made a deal where XYZ Films, the studio responsible for THE RAID, could refuse a remake.
The title tells part of a story where we have the Indonesian SWAT team equivalent raiding a mobster’s headquarters, only to face some very dangerous martial artist armed and matching the SWAT team blow for blow. And based on the trailer, this is one violent martial arts flick.
The writer/director of THE RAID, Gareth Evans is planning on working on a sequel, where plans to shoot begin in February.
I’m really sick of remakes. I’m even more sick of foreign movie remakes because half the time the foreign market just knows how to make better cinema these days and Hollywood can’t admit that. I mean compare the Spanish REC to QUARANTINE. The American version was okay, but holds no candle to how scary REC was. Look at THE GRUDGE to JU-ON, GRUDGE had cheap scares and better CGI, JU-ON knew how to keep you uneasy and suspenseful. Don’t even get me started on SHUTTER. Hollywood just likes to shit on the original work, continuously believing that they can make a better movie, because why? Because they’re American. I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but to have such blind arrogance to believe that we can take someone else’s work and assume that we can make it better by spitting on it is just fucked up. I’m sick of all of it.
“…because half the time the foreign market just knows how to make better cinema these days and Hollywood can’t admit that” – im so fvckin agree! remake movies are no better than the original.