fleahop wrote: ↑Sun Mar 27, 2022 1:33 pmThe genre doesn't adapt to film very well and even when it does, the Western world isn't ready for it/doesn't care to see it.
Literally everything about this sentence is factually, objectively wrong. In like, a dozen different ways.
The genre in this case being Wuxia as you said, has been successfully adapted well to film for literally decades longer than anyone on this forum has been alive. Be it in Asian territories like with the overwhelming bulk of the genre, or internationally with successful efforts like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and so on... Wuxia as a genre has literally NOTHING left to prove to anyone insofar as its live action film viability goes. Its been a wildly successful live action film genre for literally as long as film has existed as a medium, going back to the silent era.
Saying that Wuxia does not adapt well to live action film is literally no different at all, whatsoever from saying that horror or sci fi or dramatic-thrillers don't adapt well to film. Its ludicrous, asinine, and ignorant on its face. There literally exist more live action Wuxia films (even when just limiting it to purely the successful ones) than there are in some cases the sum total of movies that some folks have seen in their whole lifetime. This is in no way whatsoever an exaggeration: its one of the oldest and most prolific genres of fantasy fiction in existence, certainly a damn sight older and more prolific than many Western genres of fiction. I wasn't able to fill up more than 4 solid pages of forum posts on just an incredibly BASIC PRIMER of the genre's rudimentary history for nothing.
Secondly, the idea that when Wuxia does adapt well to film in general (as if that's some rare, infrequent occurrence, which it isn't), that the Western world isn't ready for it or doesn't care to see it... this is again, ludicrous and easily dubunked by basic film history, even in the recent past.
Setting aside hit international efforts like the above mentioned films (which indeed were all Hong Kong produced Wuxia live action films that there wildly successful in the Western world, including among mainstream audiences who turned out to see them even subtitled: there are also *plenty* of Western produced films that were either Wuxia influenced or just straight on Wuxia films that were wildly successful either straight out the gate, or later on in home video markets.
Big Trouble in Little China IS a Western-produced love letter to Wuxia, and while it was a box office failure in theaters, its more than made up for it on home media and is today rightly and widely celebrated in the mainstream as an 80s classic, beloved by pretty much everyone. Mortal Kombat is a heavily Wuxia-influenced hit video game franchise that had at least one live action Hollywood adaptation (that all things considered was fairly, relatively faithful to the source material) that was a mainstream box office success.
And The Matrix of course is so heavily Wuxia-influenced that the Wachowskis themselves could not stop name dropping the genre every chance they could during the white hot peak of the original film's mainstream success and turned the term Wuxia itself (for a time anyway) into a household word: and it also further opened the door for both other Wuxia-influenced mainstream Hollywood films and for mainstream Western acceptance of actual Chinese Wuxia films in the mainstream market. Even a recent Wuxia-derived superhero film like Shang Chi does not exist in a vacuum and literally would not have been made (at least certainly not made in the manner that it was) without this basic history behind it.
These are just a few, exceedingly obvious examples that anyone can name just off the cuff.
The reverberations of Wuxia's impact on mainstream Hollywood filmmaking can still be heavily, heavily felt (even on superhero films outside of Shang Chi) even today, and almost every major fantasy/nerd film that most folks here enjoy have benefitted and been influenced in some way (big or small) from the international success of Wuxia as a live action genre. Its impact goes to the very core of how so many live action films craft and execute fight scenes and action setpieces across a vast array of different sci fi and fantasy genres. Wuxia is an absolute a cornerstone of film history
even on just a purely technical level.
Even something as ludicrous, random, and seemingly unrelated to anything in the genre as a movie like
Freddy vs Jason of all things, had a former Wuxia filmmaker direct it and even execute many of its fight scenes between the two titular characters using a myriad of filmmaking techniques signature to and pioneered originally by Wuxia live action films. I only bring up an example that seemingly arbitrary and random to better illustrate just how far reaching and deep the influence of this genre on live action filmmaking actually goes: that it even deeply impacts many kinds of films you'd in NO way expect it to on the surface.
People more broadly-speaking aren't in any way new to or unfamiliar with either general, normal kung fu films in live action, nor the supernatural, fantastical, Wuxia variety of them. The people who continually time and time again seem to be the most ignorant, myoptic, and walled off from this incredibly basic level of mainstream film history (and who themselves tend to have an incredibly limited and insular definition of what the "mainstream" even is or encompasses) tends to be so-called "nerd" communities like this one made up of people who largely restrict themselves to just one *incredibly* narrow avenue of movies and TV shows. It's not just ignorance, its
self-imposed, willful ignorance.
It isn't in any way "elitism" to ask that people who claim to be enthusiastic about film as a medium maybe take some time to expose themselves to and learn more about more films that are outside of their normal tastes, preferences, and general sphere of focus: and also to recognize and understand that one's personal level of knowledge and awareness about film (or lack thereof in this case) does not in any way reflect or have any bearing on what the wider, public level of knowledge and awareness is. Something being unfamiliar and niche-seeming to YOU PERSONALLY does NOT mean it is in actuality unfamiliar or niche to a broader slice of the public at large (and vice versa of course). Your personal sphere of knowledge does not dictate the broader cultural awareness, and acting otherwise is pure egocentrism.
And as far as Dragon Ball goes in all this: lets even set aside the ultra low-budget efforts of the past like The Magic Begins (which was so low-rent by the standards of Asian films at ANY given point in time that it is in NO way reflective of what larger budget, major Hong Kong studio efforts at that time were capable of).
Over a span of, at a VERY conservative estimate, 50-ish years (both predating and during Dragon Ball's original Japanese run), Hong Kong alone had produced literally COUNTLESS live action Wuxia films (numbering well into the hundreds, if not thousands) that could easily be considered relatively high end live action Dragon Ball adaptations in all but name, utilizing just about every single one of its zillions of tropes to the letter (which is a testament to just how derivative of the genre DB itself actually is).
Hell, to bring The Magic Begins back into this: anyone here who has the Dragon Ball Magic Begins DVD (the one with all the absurd "Special Edition" style CGI alterations added), do me a favor and go ahead and pop that baby into your DVD or Blu Ray player for a second. Right now even. Go ahead and do it, I'll wait.
Popped the DVD in? Cool. Now before the DVD's main menu pops up, you'll note that you're first being treated to a whole series of live action film trailers. You'll also note that just about ALL of these films are 1) strikingly identical to Dragon Ball in nearly every aspect of their content (warriors garbed in kung fu dogi flying around Chinese landscapes and cities, firing chi blasts to and fro, powering up with large auras, moving at supersonic speeds,
and in one specific case, even Sun Wukong flying around on his magic cloud and wielding his extendo staff fighting off an invading army of space aliens and cyborgs: in live action) and 2) in most cases fairly high quality (at least for their time), much higher quality than The Magic Begins itself certainly.
Want to know why that is?
Because you're looking at trailers for a whole assortment of other Chinese live action Wuxia films. (Off the top of my head from memory, I think some of those trailers include Wind and Cloud, the 2004 Buddha's Palm TV minieries, A Chinese Tall Story, and Dragon Tiger Gate, among others: none of them at all obscure or low-profile within Asian/international markets, and hell many of these I've even used for screenshots and gifs in the old Wuxia thread back in the day.) Many of which are of course FAR higher budgeted and higher quality than The Magic Begins.
That are right there on the DVD for a live action adaptation of Dragon Ball, a Wuxia-derived manga/anime. Gosh, what were the odds of that?
Note also that many of the people who frequent this forum have had this DVD (and apparently have watched it) since its release more than 15 years ago (during the infancy of this forum). They thus have ostensibly seen these trailers (since they automatically play before you can access the menu for the movie itself) at any point during aaaaaaall those many years.
Note also that EVEN THEN DESPITE THIS, so many people on this very forum (including those who own and have seen this DVD: which I'm sad to say also includes a lot of notable names from around here who had also been incomprehensibly, inexcusably ignorant about a lot of this for way, way too long) have STILL been utterly puzzled and bewildered all this time at the notion that there might exist much of anything in the live action realm that is in any which way similar to Dragon Ball and consider the idea of DB being done well in live action to be some kind of pipe dream, and are still continually mystified and shocked when some nobody schmuck like me waltzes along and tells them that its already been done in live action countless dozens of hundreds of times.
Its almost like the problem in this specific case is less to do with the film industry (not that it isn't rife with plenty of other problems in general of course mind you) and more with the fact that fan communities like this one tend to be myopic and dense as all hell with frighteningly little historic or intellectual curiosity about the very mediums and works that they claim to be so obsessively enthusiastic about in the first place.
