Stranger Than Fiction just opened in Japan this past weekend. Japan is behind the rest of the world when it comes to movies, as you know. Anyway, at Bic they had a nice little display to promote the timex watch from that movie. I thoroughly enjoyed the film and while watching it kept thinking to myself “where can I get watch?” Now, I know!!
“Japan is behind the rest of the world when it comes to movies”
Have to totally agree with you on that, with the exception of Spidey-3. Else, I used to made my Japanese co-workers puzzled talking about movies which won’t be released till months later.
Saw on the news today that the premiere of the latest Harry Potter will be in Japan too!
I asked someone about this appalling delay the other day. Their answer was interesting. It is this. ONE woman has control of all sub-title translation. ANd she works at her own pace so we have to wait. It is noticeable when teen movies come out that her translations are a bit dated. OR so I am told. Is this an urbam myth?
That’s not exactly true. Although Toda Natsuko does do a lot of the subtitling herself there are many other more capable people out there. And personally I really dislike her translations. She takes it upon herself to change the nuance/dialogue completely sometimes which drives me crazy cause I can’t help reading subtitles while watching films.
A while back cinemas/film distribution companies used to wait to see whether a film was successful in the US or not and then market accordingly. Seemed that if it was a success in the US than Japanese people would go and see it too. If you had one shot at marketing a film and you had to chose whether to release it when it came out or to wait and see if it won an oscar first, you’d probably want to wait for the oscar because it has pretty good leverage with audiences here versus an unknown film flopping before it got proper publicity. That’s why established franchises like Spiderman and Harry Potter aren’t delayed here because everyone knows them, although Star Wars was delayed 3 months versus the rest of the world which totally pissed me off.
This legacy mentality is still around even though it doesn’t really make a difference to the success of some of the films that are under the public radar anyway.