MGM changing Red Dawn remake to avoid offending China

I’ve read the script for MGM’s Red Dawn remake, and let me tell you, probably the least offensive thing about it is the fact that the bad guys are Chinese.  Offensive to your intelligence, anyway.  In any case, because we’re all old, drippy nightgown-covered vaginas nowadays, MGM is changing the bad guys in the movie from Chinese to North Korean, thereby excising any element of integrity from the original, which was a pretty crappy movie to begin with.

Without Beijing even uttering a critical word, MGM is changing the villains in its ‘Red Dawn’ remake from Chinese to North Korean.

When MGM decided a few years ago to remake “Red Dawn,” a 1984 Cold War drama about a bunch of American farm kids repelling a Soviet invasion, the studio needed new villains, since the U.S.S.R. had collapsed in 1991. The producers substituted Chinese aggressors for the Soviets and filmed the movie in Michigan in 2009.

But potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.

As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from “Red Dawn,” substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.

People close to the picture said the changes will cost less than $1 million and involve changing an opening sequence summarizing the story’s fictional backdrop, re-editing two scenes and using digital technology to transform many Chinese symbols to Korean. It’s impossible to eliminate all references to China, the people said, though the changes will give North Korea a much larger role in the coalition that invades the U.S. [LA Times]

Spending a million dollars to avoid offending a repressive Communist regime with a fictional movie?  Why, that’s EXACTLY what Ronald Reagan would’ve done!  (*strips down to American-flag speedo, shadow boxes to “Living in America”*)