The Korea Herald reports that Hollywood is eyeing yet another beloved Asian film for the remake treatment, and the fans are already lighting torches. I don't blame them. I'd light one too, but I'm out of matches after the last dozen times this happened.

You know the pattern by heart now. Some studio buys the rights to a film people actually love, strips out everything that made it work, swaps in a screenplay written by a marketing committee, and then acts stunned when nobody shows up. The original had a soul. The remake has a release date. The trades will print otherwise on opening weekend, and the trades are wrong.

The Koreans make movies the way MGM used to, with directors who are allowed to direct and writers who are allowed to write. That's why Hollywood keeps shopping over there in the first place. Nobody remakes Bong Joon-ho or Park Chan-wook because they think they can improve them. They remake them because they've run out of ideas at home and it's cheaper than developing one. The audience figures this out in about the time it takes to watch a trailer, which is why the backlash now arrives before the film does. We've been trained. Congratulations to the studios for finally teaching us something.

I saw the remake of a Japanese horror classic years back in a theater in Tulsa, and a man two rows up said, out loud, "they took out the ending." They always take out the ending. The endings are where the meaning lives, and meaning makes executives nervous, so out it goes and in comes a CGI third act with a sequel hook nobody asked for. The Scorpion King taught Hollywood that trick and Hollywood never forgot it.

Now, I'm fair about this. There have been good remakes. The Magnificent Seven took Seven Samurai and made it its own picture, because the people making it respected the source and respected us. A Fistful of Dollars did the same with Yojimbo. The difference between those and the modern product is simple: those filmmakers loved the originals and wanted to honor them. Today's crop regards the original as an obstacle, a pile of intellectual property with inconvenient subtitles and even more inconvenient themes. You can feel the contempt through the screen, and contempt doesn't sell popcorn.

The fans complaining aren't being precious. They're being right. They watched the original, they loved it for real reasons, and they can smell a cash grab through a press release. If the studio wants to change their minds, the answer isn't a better PR campaign. It's a better movie, made by people who've actually sat through the original in a theater instead of a highlights reel prepared by an intern.

Until then, I'll keep my copy of the original on the shelf where it belongs, and I'll keep laughing at the remake on the drive home. It's a long drive from the multiplex these days. Gives me time.