I'm still fairly sure this is an elaborate April Fool's joke

Credit: Karon Liu

I never trust a trending topic on Twitter, particularly when the first day of April is just a few days away. Indeed, on this very occasion when I was browsing the micro-blogging site, a topic was trending that claimed Jackie Chan was dead. He wasn't.

Just underneath this falsification rested Jennifer Garner's name. Apparently she had been cast as Agatha Christie's pensionable sleuth Miss Marple in a Disney reboot of the series. Pull the other one, I thought.

But here I am, two days later, blogging about this very topic because the story seems to have been picked up by every news agency going and we are facing the very real possibility of a 38-year old American playing Miss Marple. If this is actually an April Fool's joke, it's right up there with the BBC's spaghetti crops.

As someone who has never claimed to be a fan of Miss Marple or even Agatha Christie, I am not one of those people who is at the point of rioting over this news. Any Hollywood re-imagining of something so quintessentially quaint and British was never going to be a good idea. Even a sensible casting decision, Judi Dench for instance, would not convince me that this was going to be a great film. I'm more concerned with what this says about the way Hollywood is interpreting its audience.

The simple truth is that a film centred on an elderly spinster will not shift tickets, no matter how good it is. There have been plenty of successful films featuring older characters, yes, but they have relied on word of mouth and attracting a certain type of cinema goer to be successful. But the industry only really wants the attention of one demographic: the 18-30 year old.

When it comes to mining the classics for their rich reserves of characters and plot, we've seen producers stray from the original many times before. More often than not, this is to bring them "up to date" and make them palatable for a modern audience. Hence, Sherlock Holmes becomes a younger, all-action hero and Othello takes place at an American high school.

Some of these re-imaginings work better than others, but when they do work it is because they have stayed true to the heart and soul of the original piece of literature and framed it in a way that the 18-30 audience can relate to. Think 10 Things I Hate About You putting a modern twist on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. When it doesn't work, the point of the story is missed completely and a character is simply mined to make the film more marketable. I know a lot of people enjoyed Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes but the BBC's Sherlock proved you can bring the character up to date without completely changing him.


Sadly, Miss Marple is in the latter category. A completely original detective story starring Jennifer Garner just wouldn't sell, but by attaching the name of a famous literary character, regardless of how unrecognisable they are from the original, you might make some money.

Perhaps we could remake the Famous Five as a group of sexy college students who solve mysteries with their sassy talking dog, Timmy (not to be confused with Scooby Doo). Justin Bieber could star as Oliver Twist, an orphaned street urchin who becomes an international music sensation.

As someone who is in the 18-30 demographic, I like to think that Hollywood woefully underestimates us. That, if they treated us like adults and gave us some straight-up, faithful adaptations we'd flock to see it. That is what my heart says.

My head says we're getting what we deserve.

So, you want us to change the nationality of our film's bad guys entirely? No Problem.

The people behind the Red Dawn remake really are geniuses. They spotted the potentially flawed logic of making China the evil, invading bad guys of their new film, realising that it doesn't necessarily pay to annoy around a billion potential customers in an increasingly lucrative commercial market. Wise reasoning indeed, the only problem being that they came to this decision after the film had actually been made.

So what to do? Scrap the entire project? $75m down the drain is a lot to lose. How about widespread reshoots? Costly, but the only real way to remove all references to China from the film. Or, you can just get it all in post-production like the Red Dawn producers chose to do.

According to the Los Angeles Times the film is having flags, symbols and dialogue digitally altered to turn the Chinese into North Koreans. As the article mentions nothing of any reshoots, we can only assume that the Chinese and Chinese-American actors in the film will miraculously become North Korean. This is hardly surprising - Hollywood seems to have no qualms about pushing the notion that all Asians look vaguely the same (just like people from the Middle-East).

As this Cracked article points out, Hollywood seems to be running out of reliable bad guys faster than you can say "regime change." It seems that the end of the Cold War was the worse thing to happen to action movie producers, which is ironic as so many of their films were about bringing down the Iron Curtain.

North Korea seems to be the frontrunner to become "the new Russia" so to speak, but I still feel uncomfortable about reducing an entire nation of people crushed under a tyrannical regime to a faceless enemy. The first action film to capitalise on the ongoing conflict in Libya will feel my wrath.

Personally, I have no problem with a fictionalised enemy. If I'm watching a film about people defending their American town from an invading foreign force, I'm not going to believe it any more if they're from North Korea, China or the evil Republic of Villainovia. The explosions and the the bullets are all the same. But for some people, the killing just isn't real if it involves those bad guys they've seen on the news. So North Korea it is.

By the way, I'm calling this now: Red Dawn will be the worst film of 2011.