'The Host, a wicked sci-fi horror comedy featuring a lithe and ravenous mutant tadpole, smashed South Korea's box office records in just six weeks.
Now it's coming to America, first in its original version, on screens in more than 100 cities this month, and then in a remake planned by Universal Pictures.'
Plans are already underway to remake 'The Host', evidently a huge success in its native Korea, even before the original has been released.
'Bong Joon-ho's film is the most visible of a new wave of genre-bending Korean films, including the upcoming D-War, a CGI-heavy $70 million film about a killer snake that invades L.A.'
Korea is where it's at right now.
'The Host deploys effects from A-list shops including L.A.-based The Orphanage (which worked on Hellboy, Sin City and Superman Returns) and Peter Jackson's Weta (Lord of the Rings trilogy). Kevin Rafferty, visual effects supervisor for Jurassic Park II, oversaw the action scenes.
The Host's international partnerships represent a rare bit of outreach for South Korean cinema, which has remained both stubbornly autonomous and artistically adventurous for years. But they also are a sign of South Korea's emerging position as new international hot spot for hip cinema.
Hollywood has taken notice. During the past six years, Hollywood studios have cashed in on J-horror with profitable remakes like The Ring and The Grudge. Recently, they've been gobbling up the rights to re-do South Korean movies including My Sassy Girl, Oldboy, My Wife Is a Gangster and Tale of Two Sisters. That's despite the so-so Keanu Reeves film Lake House, adapted from the ghost story Shiworae.'
Korean cinema has started to move away from being completely self-contained and started to branch out, namely, in the direction of Hollywood. This may be because they are acknowledging Hollywood's avid interest in their products (having realised that their own fare has been superceded in terms of commercial potential by their Korean counterparts) and ultimately the money this brings.
'Not all South Korean filmmakers are happy about hopping in bed with Hollywood studios. Some protested the way The Host monopolized the country's theaters last year, and worry that Korean cinema, which has developed a reputation in the cinephile world as distinctive and risk-taking, will revert to the cheap thrills of genre movies. If Bong can make buckets of money making a monster mash film, won't other directors and producers drop their art films and do the same?'
There is always the risk that all Korean directors will sell out.
From this article I can draw the following conclusions in the context of my project as a whole: Hollywood, being an industry that works purely on the basis of capitalism (every decision is geared toward maximum revenue) will naturally seek to re-release or remake Asian horror films if it thinks that commercial gain will come of it. The increasing tendency for Korean directors to collaborate with Hollywood suggests that there's more in it for them as well, given their country's proud cinematic heritage, although financial statistics remain hard to pin down.
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