The Case for Shot-for-Shot English-Language Remakes Is Trickier Than You Think

Taking an excellent international film, and plopping directly into the Hollywood system to try and prop it up as some new, exciting thing, has been a long-derided practice of big movie studios for decades.

The butchering of classic, radical films like Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, and Fritz Lang’s M are all examples of how Hollywood can ruin a good thing by getting their hands all over it.

While a remake can give a genre a lot of eyes (like The Ring did for J-Horror), it often fails to capture the magic of the original, more likely to turn someone off from the film entirely than sweep them up.

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