Red Dawn (2012)

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Troubled Production/Changing Villains in Post-Production

In the late 2000s, MGM decided to remake the classic Cold War action picture Red Dawn, but with it updated for modern times. Shooting started in September of 2009 with the plan to have the film released for Thanksgiving of 2010. The idea was to have the movie feature an invasion of the US from China. Most of the film was completed, but distributor MGM's financial problems got so severe that the money ran out and the shooting was abruptly cut off.

The movie sat on the shelf for a few years. In 2010, publicity posters were released which were made to look like propaganda from the Chinese government after they invaded the US. This drew high amounts of criticism from people who felt it was unfair to compare China to the Soviet Union (the villains in the original Red Dawn) and that their relation to the US was very different. In 2011, it was decided that--due to current political tensions, the brutality of Kim Jong Il's regime, large amounts of criticism for anyone who gave a damn about current events, and the influence of China on the film market--the villains would be changed to North Koreans. The dialogue of the enemy army would be dubbed over in Korean and the flags would be digitally altered to have the flag of North Korea, not China. It was unclear how the movie would address the fact that most of the extras were Chinese and thus did not look like Koreans.

Once MGM got through the hardest part of their financial difficulty, they were able to finish the visuals on the picture and tried their best to re-edit the picture in order to hide that a few scenes in the screenplay had never been shot. An agreement was reached with FilmDistrict in order for the movie to be distributed on Thanksgiving 2012, two years to the week from when it was originally intended to be released.

While there were obviously a lot of things working against the movie before its release, a plus was that stars Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson, who had been relative unknowns when they were cheaply hired to shoot Red Dawn, had now become major stars thanks to movies like Thor and The Hunger Games.