4 Reasons Why Hollywood Fails The Anime/Manga Genre

MARKETING

Its Oldboy! Everyone loves the 2007 version from Korea. That means everyone will love the American remake, right?

WRONG!  I’m sure many of you reading will be  surprised to learn this was originally a Japanese manga written by Garon Tsuchiya and illustrated by Nobuaki Minegishi. See, here is a case where you have a good actor (Josh Brolin), okay director (Spike Lee), and what seemed like a hearty budget. My god, its a scene for scene remake from the 2007 film.

Why didn’t people want to see this? Not only did folks not want to see this version of Oldboy, it goes down in history as one of the most abysmal box office failures ever. I believe the responsibility of failure goes partially to marketing department. I saw a few posters and almost no trailers. What audience is Spike Lee trying to target? An indie crowd? A blockbuster crowd? I couldn’t tell. Neither could anyone else, apparently. So what do people do when they want to avoid confusion? They move on to the next movie.

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