It hasn’t been smooth sailing for the remake of Red Dawn, which was shot in 2009 and then shelved during the maelstrom that was MGM’s bankruptcy filing (one silver lining: Stars Josh Hutcherson, Adrianne Palicki, and Chris Hemsworth — whose long-delayed Cabin in the Woods is also an MGM orphan — will have only become more famous by the time the movie actually does come out). Now the movie has run into a new problem: Since its villains are Chinese, potential distributors don’t want to pick up the movie for fear of jeopardizing their business dealings with China. To compensate, producers have authorized up to $1 million in changes to digitally transform much of the Chinese iconography so that the villains are North Korean instead; however, the references to China are so pervasive throughout the movie that many of them will remain anyway, though the L.A. Times reports that “the changes will give North Korea a much larger role in the coalition that invades the U.S.” So, the Chinese will still be bad guys, but they’ll now be under the thumb of the tiny, lunatic North Korean government? They will love that. [LAT]
