You make a good point. If Disney had the balls to really promote a Ghibli movie I think they could make mad bank on it. But that Hollywood thinking is just so pervasive that even after Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon it seems they wrote it off as a fluke.
I have a theory that lack of reading speed is what makes people down on subtitles. I have met several people who say it’s too fast when the subtitles are going maybe a sentence at a time.
Also, despite making a HUGE amount of money, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a bit of an aberration:
Ang Lee, the director, was SUPER hot in Hollywood, having made Sense and Sensibility in 1995, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards.
Michelle Yeoh had recently been in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies.
Chow Yun-Fat was still relative hot and a new commodity in Hollywood after staring in The Replacement Killers, the Corruptor, and Anna and the King. Plus, both he and Yeoh had a huge cult following in the Hong Kong cinema scene.
Those are all reasons why Hollywood liked the movie. But what percentage of the audience that bought tickets knew or cared about any of that?
But that’s my point!
Hollywood liked the movie, and the director and stars were “bankable,” so there was less of a need to tinker with it or adapt it. The same can’t be said for many other movies or anime.
At the end of the day, Hollywood hates risk and will do everything they can to mitigate it. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was less of a risk because of the reasons I listed. Releasing a foreign movie, whether animated or live action, is a much bigger risk.
Additionally, that risk is multiplied if they put a decent marketing campaign behind it. If Hollywood releases Animated Movie X with very little marketing, the risk is low but the potential reward is also low to very high, if the movie takes off. On the other hand, if Hollywood releases Animated Movie Y with a HUGE marketing campaign, the reward is much higher, sure, but so is the risk, which outweighs the potential greater reward in the Hollywood mindset/groupthink.
Additionally, in the minds of Hollywood executives, taking a foreign movie, animated or otherwise, adapting it for US audiences, and putting in a “bankable” star is less risk than releasing the original movie, even if the adaptation gets a big marketing campaign. The recent Ghost In the Shell movie is the perfect example of this.
I don’t know if this would count, since it never had an anime adaptation, but Edge of Tomorrow is based off a manga, and it’s quite good.
Also, Speed Racer is extremely faithful to the anime, even if it does look like a visual migraine.
That’s not really cutting it. It is possible to adapt things to film very very well. Live theater adapts to film extremely well. 12 Angry Men, Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, Death of a Salesman, and so on.
Books, while often not done well or entirely faithfully to the original work, have been adapted well on numerous occasions. LotR, Rebecca, The Godfather, Fight Club, Forrest Gump, Jurassic Park, Blade Runner, to name a few.
I think what happens quite often is that when a film adaptation is truly excellent, the original work often takes a back seat. Other times it becomes nearly forgotten.
But my main point is that theater and novels have been adapted to live action films of truly legendary top tier quality. Anime, manga (or really comics from any country), and video games have not.
If Paramount and JJ want to waste their money and time, they can. It just seems like a stupid thing for them to do. What do they think they know that we don’t?
Paramount just gambled and “lost” on Ghost in the Shell. I put that in quotes because it cost $110M and with triple the returns from outside the US, they made $170M (no idea if advertising, etc., is included in that).
Maybe the US is a lost market, and they’ll make it up in foreign ticket sales.
This is kind of already the case. Many movies, especially summer blockbusters, make far more money overseas particularly China with India catching up fast. This is why a lot of movies are high on spectacle and melodrama and low on plot, because it is what moviegoers in China and India want in a movie. Many movies are also at least partially bankrolled by Chinese interests, which is also why you see things like the Red Dawn remake being edited to have North Korea as the invading force and not China, and controversial western topics or sentiments putting China in a bad light are removed from movies. The Chinese backers demand it to get past Chinese censors with a minimum of hassle and the production companies comply because there is big money to be made in the Asian market.
Holy crap JP twitter. Any more gems? If its in Japanese I can give a translation.