This Week in the Mercury
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Film
In the New Red Dawn, the Wolverines Will Fight the Chinese North Koreans
Posted by Erik Henriksen on Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:05 PM
Via the Los Angeles Times:
When MGM decided a few years ago to remake Red Dawn, a 1984 Cold War drama about a bunch of American farm kids repelling a Soviet invasion, the studio needed new villains, since the U.S.S.R. had collapsed in 1991. The producers substituted Chinese aggressors for the Soviets and filmed the movie in Michigan in 2009.But potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.
As a result, the filmmakers now 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.
Red Dawn is one of several unreleased films MGM produced before they collapsed; like another one of those movies, the Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard horror flick The Cabin in the Woods, it's unclear when, or if, it'll ever see a theatrical release. But hell, if they're already messing with the film to make the North Koreans the bad guys, they might as well go all the way. MGM, if you can include this moving musical number somewhere in the film—maybe as a prologue of sorts?—I think you'll really be onto something.
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