The media landscape is overrun with nostalgia, remakes, reboots, and surprise sequels. Disney has made big bucks with its recent trend of live-action remakes, and old-school movies like A Star Is Born are considered ideal fodder for being revitalized to win Oscar gold. However, one current trend that’s starting to lose its relevance and luster is remakes of highly acclaimed foreign movies. News concerning Leonardo DiCaprio’s American, English language remake of Thomas Vinterburg’s Oscar-winning Another Round has thrown the need for these kinds of movies back into the public arena. Do we really need a nigh instantaneous Hollywood remake of a foreign film when that movie is already beloved by the international market?
Hollywood Remakes of Foreign Films Are Happening Way Too Soon
One of the justifications for some remakes is to update them for a more modern audience. Recent Oscar darling CODA is a remake of a 2014 French-Belgian film named La Famille Bélier. The film benefits (and sets itself apart from the original) by employing deaf actors to portray the characters in the movie, debatably improving the original film with this element. However, other foreign remakes don’t have the benefit of being more progressive or even “updating” anything at all. The movies themselves are being announced and released way too soon after the original release.
While some films like Suspiria have over a forty-year gap between the release of the original and remake (along with significant stylistic changes), this is not the norm with remakes of foreign films. The Departed only came out four years after its inspiration, the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, was released. The 2018 Dutch film The Guilty only had three years before its American remake starring Jake Gyllenhall. Now, with movies like Parasite and Another Round, a remake is being announced as soon as the movies prove lucrative and successful in awards shows. It’s not even like the movies were only successful in their home country – they won Oscars, with Parasite sweeping and taking home the top award for Best Picture. Adam Mckay, the creator of the new Parasite series claims that the remake series isn't trying to replace it and is merely set "in the same universe" as the original film, and that’s a good sign, but the fact that it’s taking the same name feels wrong considering how insurmountable a foreign film winning Best Picture really is.
Unlike other remakes, there’s nothing these new movies can do to set themselves apart from the original release because nothing’s really changed. By adapting Another Round, you don’t have the excuse of offering a story from say, the 70s or 80s and giving it a modern reshaping. You’re just making the movie again.. in English. In our increasingly modernized and global world, it’s no longer a Seven Samurai to The Magnificent Seven scenario, there's no genre hopping happening here. No major changes can conceivably be added to these movies to make them worthy successors. Rather than letting these original movies sit in the public consciousness, they’re immediately snatched up not for interesting creative development but because the higher-ups see them as an easy success.
Movies Remakes Are Everywhere - We Don't Need More of Them
Even outside the realm of foreign films, movie theatres are inundated with remakes nowadays. Whether it’s Disney continuing to push for live-action remakes of their old properties, horror franchises attempting to reboot money-maker stories of old, or even just simple remakes of old Hollywood-proven success stories. While the remake engine has chugged out a few good movies like the Coen Brothers' 2010 True Grit (and even the Disney remake engine produces something interesting once in a while), the unfortunate truth is the formula has produced far more stinkers than success stories.
2015’s Point Break turned an immensely successful bank heist movie into a slog. 2017’s Flatliners similarly took the original’s interesting and terrifying premise and fell flat on its face, a similar fate befalling 2019’s remake of the extremely influential horror classic Jacob’s Ladder. The less said about 2012’s Total Recall, the better. The list goes on and on, there are scores of terrible remakes that fail to live up to anything that the original tried to do, foreign remake or not. The market is saturated with them at the moment, and there’s not been enough pay-off to justify it moving forward.
Contrast this with the fact that exciting original properties are getting more and more attention these days, and it becomes even more unnecessary for the remake engine to continue pumping along. Studios like A24 have found immense success with original and unusual blockbusters. Most recently, the relatively low-budget Everything Everywhere All At Once has become the most-awarded movie of all time. It’s a sign of a healthy industry that new and interesting films like that are given the attention they deserve. Conversely, continuing to remake the same tired old franchises and age-old blockbuster successes is a sign of stagnation, an industry that’s too afraid to take the risks necessary to bring it into the future. Better to put the budget for the next few terrible or middling remakes of Hollywood classics and successful foreign productions into something new and exciting.
Foreign-Language Films and Shows Are Getting More International Attention
In recent years there’s been a bit of an explosion of appreciation and acceptance of media made in countries outside the US. Parasite won best picture, and Squid Game became an overnight phenomenon. The Bollywood smash hit RRR has also garnered immense international acclaim and attention (and Oscar gold), despite (or perhaps because of) its focus on Indian political drama. Aside from Squid Game, other international streaming successes have been Spain’s Money Heist and Germany’s sci-fi horror Dark. There’s been a proven push for more diverse and international stories in our public media sphere, and foreign remakes are becoming less and less necessary with that in mind.
Concurrently, there’s been a noticeable push to desegregate the Best Picture and Best International Picture categories with the Oscars. Before Parasite eventually took home the Oscar for Best International Picture and became the first non-English Best Picture winner, there were a few instances of precedent before it. A year before, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma won Best International Picture and was nominated for Best Picture, a rare case for a Spanish-language film. Similarly, in 2021, Drive My Car became not only the second time that a Japanese film has won a Best International Picture Oscar but also the first time that a Japanese film has ever been nominated for Best Picture. With the line in the sand fading between the two categories, it seems the academy is becoming more aware of the importance of more than just domestic film recognition.
There have been more international foreign language mainstream success stories before – 2000’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was the first foreign-language film to make over $100 million in the US, with the French film Amélie receiving critical acclaim a year later. Guillermo Del Toro created a modern classic with his 2006 dark fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth despite being entirely devoid of English and relying heavily on the political context of the years after the Spanish Civil War. At the time, however, these were the exceptions that proved the rule; foreign films did not often see broad success outside of their home countries. In a post-streaming world, it seems that audiences are much more willing to embrace difference and diversity in their media, no longer requiring the “filtering” that foreign film remakes entail. If audiences are willing to go straight to the source with their entertainment, do we really need a middleman?
Foreign Films Help to Familiarize and Connect Cultures
Quality of a remake aside, for a lot of these movies, there’s also an appeal to the “international” nature of the film that any remake would have to lose. Parasite might be a fairly universal critique of class, but the way it tells its story and the details it pulls from to do so are uniquely South Korean, such as the plight of those living in basement apartments. Other films like Roma, Another Round, RRR, and even genre films like Train to Busan (also slated to receive an American remake) are rooted in their own cultural specificity and are made what they are by the perspectives and experiences of their non-American creators. The topics or discussions these movies pull from are interesting because the domestic audience isn’t familiar with them. It not only has the power to teach audiences but engage them in a way that a movie that is entirely familiar would not. Critic Roger Ebert once said in a 2005 speech that “movies are a machine that generates empathy”, and this is very much true for international and foreign movies. They familiarize foreign cultures and peoples in a way that domestic audiences might not even notice, passively improving their worldliness and understanding of culture. If all movies have to be filtered to just showcase American people and problems, then the world only gets smaller.
Foreign movie remakes are entirely unnecessary these days. Productions don’t allow enough time for the films to mature and change, remakes are already saturating the market, and audiences have shown that they’re willing to embrace foreign-language movies and shows. The fact that these movies are no longer needed shouldn’t be seen as a problem but as a positive step forward. If audiences are happy to consume foreign media, it means that more stories can be told, with foreign films getting better domestic responses and studios putting more money into original projects. This globalization of the film industry introduces an entire world of excellent films to an audience that before was only sold inferior versions. As Parasite’s director Bong Joon-ho stated in his Golden Globes acceptance speech, "Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films."