The Karate Kid Remake

I don’t have a problem with the concept of Hollywood updating an older film. Some movie stories are good enough to be timeless, but they just need an update for the current culture. The Karate Kid is one such movie story.

I saw The Karate Kid in the theaters in 1984, when I was a high school teenager, and I firmly liked the film. It became part of the American culture at the time. But looking back at it now, the presentation is a bit dated.

The story can still resonate with kids today; it just needs modern actors and modern scenery. The script could almost be reused as is, but some tweaking for modern culture would help it. This is why I think the idea of a new production of The Karate Kid is a good idea.

But then I saw the trailer:

A couple of things jump out at me:

First, why the big difference in the story? Why a completely different story? The original script and story didn’t need to be scrapped.

1984 move is to another American city. 2010 move is to China? 1984 Daniel was 16 years old. 2010 Dre is 12 years old? These drastically change the mood of the story.

If a story is good enough to be retold, isn’t it good enough to be retold without being completely rewritten? If they’re going to tell a totally different story, why reuse the old name?

The move to China introduces two oddities:

One: Will the movie be subtitled, (I doubt it), or will everyone conveniently speak English for us, (I expect so).

Two: Chinese martial arts is not Karate. It’s Kung Fu, (as said in the trailer). Calling this film “The Karate Kid” is like naming a movie “The Baseball Kid” and having it be about cricket.

So, they invoke the name of a classic film, but then rewrite the script in such a way that it is only very vaguely related. Why bother presenting it as a “remake”? How about just calling it, “The Kung Fu Kid”? (Upon deeper reading about this film, it seems it will be titled The Kung Fu Kid in other countries.)

By reusing the original name, the producers seem to expect to bring in people who liked the original (a demographic old enough to remember the original). But anyone familiar enough with the original to be drawn to a remake will immediately see (from the trailer) that this isn’t a remake at all. People will either like it or dislike it regardless of their feelings for the original, because this is essentially a whole new movie.

This is like the Starship Troopers movie. For some reason, the producers wanted to associate the film with the name of a great novel, but then they made the movie in such a way that the story had no relationship to its namesake. And anyone who would be interested in the movie because of the novel would see immediately that it wasn’t related to the novel at all, (and would probably be pissed, as I was). Anyone who didn’t know of the novel wouldn’t care that the film pretended to tie in to it.

Too often, Hollywood thinking and marketing just makes no sense whatsoever.

Bullgrit