3 ms·

I generally agree with your premises other than Asian movies (especially Japanese) have always been considered amazing and were a major part of supporting artho

I generally agree with your premises other than Asian movies (especially Japanese) have always been considered amazing and were a major part of supporting arthouse cinema from the 60s on, it's Korean movies that have caught on. Kung Fu Hustle was literally the highest grossing foreign film in the US in 2005. Korean movies caught on not because of some change in Western aesthetics, but because they got better; Park Chan-Wook led the way. I deeply disagree with your conclusion, however. Westerners have had plenty of opportunities to like (e.g.) Running Man since K-Dramas became popular. Plenty do. It's not a new exposure to something different. Any show with subtitles operates at a disadvantage; shows that have constant titles appearing and disappearing on the screen and also have subtitled speech are an extremely tough sell, especially since (e.g.) Running Man is dumb and it's target audience is going to be people looking for a laugh. edit: you could get people used to the stupid noises and canned laughter, but all that stuff is usually used to punctuate the appearance and disappearance of on-screen titles.

sho_hn 4y ago
It was specifically Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk that my friends outside the arthose/festival circuit rejected at the time, though, for example Seom or even Old-boy, as "too foreign". I think the internet- and streaming-driven globalization of media & subsequent exposure have definitely reduced the sort of knee-jerk inhibitions against watching something where the entire cast of characters is non-Western, or something subtitled. Content outside the Western bubble has increasingly lost the "this is a little strange and foreign" patina for average people in the millenials and younger gen. If you're below 25, and your fav sports team is perhaps an e-sports team from Korea rather than your local football club, you may not even realize people really, broadly used to think like that. When I was young, it was nearly impossible to watch a non-dubbed movie in theaters in Germany unless you lived in a major city, and even then it would be a special screening stuffed into an 11pm slot for the nerds. Which meant that content that didn't get dubbed would never be seen, and hardly anything not from Hollywood or major European countries would get dubbed. Now a big chunk of the programming in any theater is "original audio" screenings and it's no longer something that strikes people as odd to attend at all. Many countries' cinemas now get to contend in the market.

sho_hn 4y ago

It was specifically Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk that my friends outside the arthose/festival circuit rejected at the time, though, for example Seom or even Old-boy, as "too foreign". I think the internet- and streaming-driven globalization of media & subsequent exposure have definitely reduced the sort of knee-jerk inhibitions against watching something where the entire cast of characters is non-Western, or something subtitled. Content outside the Western bubble has increasingly lost the "this is a little strange and foreign" patina for average people in the millenials and younger gen. If you're below 25, and your fav sports team is perhaps an e-sports team from Korea rather than your local football club, you may not even realize people really, broadly used to think like that. When I was young, it was nearly impossible to watch a non-dubbed movie in theaters in Germany unless you lived in a major city, and even then it would be a special screening stuffed into an 11pm slot for the nerds. Which meant that content that didn't get dubbed would never be seen, and hardly anything not from Hollywood or major European countries would get dubbed. Now a big chunk of the programming in any theater is "original audio" screenings and it's no longer something that strikes people as odd to attend at all. Many countries' cinemas now get to contend in the market.