Hollywood’s Guide to Remaking International Films: A Completely Unofficial and Deeply Sarcastic Manual

📌 A satirical guide to Hollywood’s approach to remaking international films — complete with step-by-step instructions for stripping out everything that made the original great.

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Congratulations! You have just acquired the rights to a beloved international film. Perhaps it is a Korean revenge thriller that won the Palme d’Or. Perhaps it is a French romantic drama that made the entire world weep. Perhaps it is a Japanese horror film that terrified audiences in seventeen countries. Whatever it is, you have paid a significant sum for the rights, and now you need to turn it into a Hollywood film. Do not panic. Hollywood has been doing this for decades, and there is a well-established process. Simply follow the steps in this completely unofficial, deeply sarcastic, and entirely accurate manual, and you will have a perfectly serviceable remake ready for release within eighteen months.

Step 1: Remove Everything That Made It Interesting

The first and most important step in remaking an international film is to identify everything that made the original interesting and remove it. This will seem counterintuitive at first — after all, you paid for the rights because the original was interesting. But here is the key insight that Hollywood has refined over decades of practice: the thing that made the original interesting is almost certainly the thing that will make your remake difficult to market. The ambiguous ending? Replace it with a clear resolution. The morally compromised protagonist? Give them a redemption arc. The culturally specific setting? Move it to New York, Los Angeles, or a generic American city that could be anywhere. The uncomfortable social commentary? Soften it into a feel-good message about the human spirit. By the time you have finished this step, you will have a story that is significantly less interesting than the original, but significantly easier to put on a poster.

Step 2: Cast the Most Expensive White Actor Available

Having stripped your story of everything interesting, you will need to cast it. The casting process for a Hollywood remake of an international film follows a simple algorithm: identify the most expensive white actor currently available, and cast them in the lead role, regardless of the cultural specificity of the character. This algorithm has been applied with remarkable consistency across decades of Hollywood remakes. It was applied to Ghost in the Shell (Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese cyborg). It was applied to Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (Jason Scott Lee, who is at least of Chinese-Hawaiian descent, which is progress of a sort). It was applied to The Last Samurai (Tom Cruise, inexplicably, as the emotional centre of a film about the samurai tradition). The algorithm is not infallible — occasionally a studio will cast an actor of the correct cultural background, at which point the film will receive critical praise and modest box office, and the studio will conclude that diverse casting does not work commercially, which is not what the data shows at all.

Step 3: Explain Everything

One of the most distinctive qualities of great international cinema is its willingness to trust the audience — to leave things unsaid, unexplained, ambiguous. The original film you have acquired almost certainly contains scenes of significant emotional complexity that are conveyed entirely through image, performance, and silence. Your job, in the remake, is to explain all of these scenes in dialogue. If two characters exchange a long, charged look across a room, have one of them say ‘I think I’m falling for you.’ If a character makes a morally ambiguous decision, have them deliver a monologue explaining their reasoning. If the film ends on an image of profound, unresolved ambiguity, have a character explain what the image means. Your audience, the algorithm has determined, does not like ambiguity. They like to know what things mean. Give them what they like. The original film’s director, watching from abroad, will understand. They have been paid.

“The original was designed for an audience that wanted a great film. The remake was designed for an audience that wanted a familiar experience in a language they already speak.”

Step 4: Add a Dog

This step is optional but strongly recommended by the marketing department. Research consistently shows that the presence of a dog in a film increases audience approval ratings by an average of 12%. If your remake is a horror film, the dog should survive (audiences are significantly more distressed by the death of a dog than by the death of a human character, a fact that says something interesting about our species). If your remake is a romantic drama, the dog should serve as a bonding mechanism between the two leads. If your remake is a revenge thriller, the dog can be the inciting incident for the revenge (see: John Wick, which is technically not a remake of an international film but demonstrates the principle perfectly). The original film almost certainly did not contain a dog. This is because the original film was made by a director who was thinking about themes, character, and cultural context. You are thinking about the marketing campaign. These are different things.

Step 5: Release It in February and Blame the Critics

Having completed steps one through four, you are ready to release your remake. The optimal release window for a Hollywood remake of an international film is February — far enough from the Christmas prestige season to avoid comparison with films that people actually want to see, and close enough to Valentine’s Day to justify a romantic subplot that you added in step one. When the film receives mixed reviews, release a statement noting that critics are ‘out of touch with mainstream audiences.’ When the film underperforms at the box office, note that ‘the theatrical experience is evolving.’ When someone points out that the original film is significantly better, explain that ‘the remake was designed for a different audience.’ This is technically true. The original was designed for an audience that wanted a great film. The remake was designed for an audience that wanted a familiar experience in a language they already speak. Both audiences exist. Only one of them will remember the film in ten years.

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💬 Join the Conversation

Which step in this manual do you think Hollywood follows most faithfully?

And which international film has been most spectacularly mishandled by the remake machine?

👇Tell us in the comments.

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