New ‘Oldboy?’ Smith and Spielberg Team Up For Remake
Yup, you could just drop Will Smith right into this poster and it would look fine.
Variety reports that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are in talks to remake Park Chanwook’s popular action film Oldboy. Dreamworks is trying to acquire the rights and Universal would release the new version.
Oldboy was based on a Japanese manga. The plot is pretty simple: a man is held hostage in a hotel room until one day he is suddenly released, given a cell phone and a wallet with some cash, and told he has five days to find out who imprisoned him and why. The film, made in 2003 and released in the US in 2005, was well-received, although some people recoiled at its excess violence.
I haven’t seen the film, but I just read a bit about it. So now I ask this question: if Will Smith ends up playing the lead role in the film, will he do the squid scene as it was originally made? Yuck.
5 Comments
November 7th, 2008 at 6:44 am
(spoiler alert)
Great film but forget about the excess violence, What I’m reeeally looking forward to see is how Spielberg and Smith tackle the issues of torture, self-harm and incest which play such a major part in the film and, if left out, will be like neutering a pitbull.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:28 am
You know, like I said, I only read about the original, but Spielberg and Smith do seem like an odd pair to take it on, don’t they?
November 8th, 2008 at 10:38 am
I saw this in the theater. Don’t recall the “squid” scene. Do remember the incest and violence. Don’t recall that it was especially graphic, certainly less explicit that Saw or something like that.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
It was an octopus. Oh Dae-Su eats it raw. This is one of (if not the) greatest films made in the last thirty years. Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are the single worst fit possible. Well almost. It could be Uwe Boll and Freddie Prinze Jr. But the fact of the matter is, the remake (if casted as is rumored) will be painfully difficult to watch at best.
January 10th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
OMG! PLEASE DO NOT LET WILL SMITH BE IN THIS MOVIE! he could never take an axe to the back and whoop the ass of a whole room full of people WITH a hammer! I heard they’re going to redo all of chanwook park’s films. im excited to see them with out reading the subtitles(not really) PLEASE DO NOT RUIN THESE! it’ll probably just be an exuse for people to go out and see the orginals and compare – and say, “wow, the asain movies were wayyy better.” if it will smith, this movie better be “fresh” prince.
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