24 Reasons Spider-Man & Dragonball Evolution Are The Same Movie

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Hellspawn28
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24 Reasons Spider-Man & Dragonball Evolution Are The Same Movie

Post by Hellspawn28 » Wed Jun 27, 2018 9:17 pm

Couch Tomato is known for making videos for comparing two movies for fun. He did one on Spider-Man and Dragon Ball Evolution with a special help from someone on Patreon. I always felt like they try to make Dragon Ball Evolution to follow the story beats of the 2002 Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie's formula.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXVf1Kk__UU
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Re: 24 Reasons Spider-Man & Dragonball Evolution Are The Same Movie

Post by Yuli Ban » Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:25 pm

Hellspawn28 wrote:Couch Tomato is known for making videos for comparing two movies for fun. He did one on Spider-Man and Dragon Ball Evolution with a special help from someone on Patreon. I always felt like they try to make Dragon Ball Evolution to follow the story beats of the 2002 Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie's formula.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXVf1Kk__UU
I'm fairly certain that the reason for this is threefold:

1: Hollywood hadn't done anime-to-live action movies in any major capacity before then. The closest that existed was The Matrix; it was always imagined by the Wachowskis as being Ghost In The Shell, but real. But they were able to do it only because it wasn't Ghost In The Shell. What's more, they were trying to work with the original series rather than the much more popular Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball Z was viciously scrubbed and rewritten as a Western action show to the point that even some old members of this very forum would attest to that. Dragon Ball, on the other hand, was treated more faithfully, but wasn't as popular due to a wide range of reasons. If they had made a movie out of the Westernized DBZ, we might have gotten something a bit better because the writers wouldn't be wrestling with so many foreign elements that I bet many didn't even know existed outside of Dragon Ball. I'm not even saying the "W" word, but you know what I'm talking about. Go read his thread again, cry over your data usage a bit. But overall, the writers didn't really have a good feel for what anime was like, of Dragon Ball's influences, and how to translate that into live-action. They could have if they thought of looking to Hong Kong and Taiwanese movies, but there was still a cultural gap.

2: Executive Meddling. So not only did Hollywood have no clue how to make an anime movie, but Hollywood executives also felt they knew better than Akira Toriyama about how the story should unfold. They were looking at past successes, reading data charts, passing around statistics at boardroom meetings— the data said that a relatively inoffensive "high school loser saves the world and gets the girl" plot made the most money. You see, Hollywood is actually a very unoriginal place but they've mastered the art of making tired, cliche works seem original. They take risks very rarely because despite the underdog stories of creatives breaking through, risky stories tend to not pay off. Dragon Ball is a very risky story. The overarching themes and plots are simple, undoubtedly, but the way it's executed— rural barbarian boy with a monkey tail and magic staff teams up with an overtly flirtatious blue-haired teenager, a talking Marxist pig, a virgin bandit and his floating shape-shifting cat, a perverted little Buddhist boy, and a hyper-perverted 300-year-old martial arts master living on a remote island with his thousand-year-old turtle seek seven mystical balls that ejaculate a giant dragon that makes your wish come true— that all sounds so daft, so incomprehensible, so off-the-walls outrageous that of course it was some loony perverted Japanese comic artist who came up with it. The charts set themselves on fire just bearing the cover of the first issue of Dragon Ball.

3: The 2008 Writer's Strike meant that there wasn't much work on refining the story that could be done. Hollywood was looking for some projects that they still had but shelved, and on the shelf was Dragonball: Evolution. What's more, it was based on a popular anime property that kids loved (a decade ago) so they could afford putting some money into it during a time when no one is pulling in a lot of money. After all, Dragon Ball fans are all dorky kids, right? They won't care if they replace everything with a more generic plot. It'll still make them money!
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