MGM Kowtows to China, Makes North Korea the New 'Red Dawn' Enemy
Fearful of angering the world's rising economic powerhouse--and potential distributors, who want to make a few bucks overseas--MGM has decided to digitally alter their already-shot remake of Red Dawn to remove references to China being the film's enemy invaders. Though the Chinese government hasn't actually said anything about the the 1984 original's Soviet invaders being switched to Chinese invaders for this version, the feeling over at money-strapped MGM is that it's better to play it safe when it comes to making sure they both find a distributor and make some yuan on this thing, so the studio is belatedly switching the enemy to North Korea, because no one's even pretending we can still make good with those guys.
A producer told the LA Times he thinks the changes--which include "changing an opening sequence summarizing the story's fictional backdrop, re-editing two scenes and using digital technology to transform many Chinese symbols to Korean"--"make a scarier, smarter and more dangerous 'Red Dawn' that we believe improves the movie." Which may well be, but either way, the real point of it seems to be making peace with our future Chinese overlords. So hopefully they'll all be cool with the implied sentiment that Asian people are interchangeable if you just CGI a different flag behind them.
