I should have pointed out I'm a native French speaker but I'm not European - and I live but a few hours drive from the US and work very often with Americans, so I'm all too familiar with all this.

(Seriously, I think the "traditional" Americano-centrism of a majority of Americans is something really negative but that's another topic altogether)




Pretty much what I said. I work in the film industry, so I know American movies shot in anything else than English (or virtually only in English) would have zero chance of commercial success. Heck, an American friend of mine once complained he dislikes how there's more and more characters speaking Spanish on US TV shows...)



That's a very American comment But I know you probably didn't mean it as it sounds.




Worse? Worse for whom? For Americans? No, certainly. I won't argue that. It's your problem if for you a good movie set in historical France has to be made by Americans, with American playing French people, with not a single word of French and nothing that conflicts with the American vision of what French culture is in it. Even though I can't really understand why an American audience prefer that over something more authentic (you like those novels in translation well enough, after all - you didn't wait for an American to come and rewrite a more Americanized version), or what the interest of adapting foreign stories really is when it's done like that way, I don't really care about it (I certainly don't find it offensive). At least, as long as I keep my freedom not to watch them!

I just don't find any interest in those movies, whether they're about my own culture or most others. I enjoy American movies well enough when they're about American stories. I systematically watch them in English, by the way (I very rarely watch movies in anything but the language they were filmed in, whether I understand the language or not, whether it's just entertainment or an auteur movie. Not only European movies - I watch tons of Asian movies.)

Are American adaptations of European novels worse than a European adaptation of the same story? To me, production value aside I can't possibly see how they could be better or even equal, being so much lacking in authenticity.

To an American audience, it's definitely not the same (with the huge caveat that yours is a huge country, and the average American audience is hardly every American. There are tons of Americans interested and/or familiar enough with this or that European culture who won't find an American adaptation of an European novel any more authentic or truly enjoyable than someone from that culture would, and proof of that is that there are tons of foreign movies with subtitles distributed in the US, and I bet most of those in the US who enjoy foreign films prefer to watch them in the foreign language with subtitles instead of a version dubbed in English. Part of the reasons why you don't see many foreign films with subtitles in theaters isn't only because there's little demand for them. People have never developped a taste for them in the US because "Hollywood" keeps them out of the market, and has done so for a very long time. Americans have little idea how rapacious the Hollywoodian studios truly are abroad (and even of your domestic market). You don't dominate the movie market worldwide because your movies are the best or that's only what people want to see. You make a number of really excellent movies each year, and tons of crap or near crap. It's perfectly normal the best movies get foreign distribution, and even the average ones. But the crap? How it works is rather like this and a bit like blackmail: to get to show the good (or at least very popular) stuff, you have to agree to give many of your screens for a minimum numbers of weeks to the rest of the studios's other movies that aren't good and won't make much money. You won't give us 100 screens for Conan the Barbarian? Well, you'll get only 50 instead of the 250 copies of our Christmas blockbuster. They do more or less the same thing for foreign movies and American independent cinema domestically. Several countries have passed laws to force the theater owners to reserve screens for their local cinema (and not because no one wants to see those movies...) - laws the American studios and distribution companies lobby bitterly against.

That's how even the worse Hollywood crap gets wide worldwide distribution instead of only the truly good movies, and how they manage to stay in theaters for a few weeks even when they flop (often longer than they manage to do on your domestic market).