The strange journey of the long-gestating Oldboy remake continues, as the project originally tipped for Steven Spielberg and Will Smith has now officially become a Spike Lee joint starring Josh Brolin, who has wrested the role away from his Men In Black III co-star. With Brolin on board, the U.S. version of Park Chan-wook’s brutal, twisty thriller—which has been in the works since about 2008—looks to be finally moving toward production sometime next spring. And while some may quibble with the idea of the already plenty rough-and-tumble Brolin playing the businessman who, after being kidnapped on his daughter’s birthday, slowly hardens himself for hammer time through years of imprisonment, others will most likely take some comfort that it’s not the even-odder pairing of Spielberg and Smith, currently screening in some unthinkable alternate universe where people say something like, I don’t know, “mustard fart” instead of “goodbye.” But you can still probably expect Lee and Brolin’s version—which screenwriter Mark Protosevich is basing on both the Korean film and the original manga—to scrub out some of the more infamously uncomfortable, salacious elements in order to make it more palatable to American audiences. So in other words, no more fried dumplings. American audiences just aren’t ready for all the fried dumplings.
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