Will Smith is trying to convince us that his Oldboy project with Steven Spielberg is not going to be a remake of Park Chan-wook's 2003 film. Speaking to Film School Rejects, Smith says that they've acquired rights for not the Korean film, but the original Japanese manga it was based on.
Which is, of course, a clever excuse to make the movie more palatable for an American audience, yet at the same time avoid comparison by saying that it's not the same story.
We’re looking at that right now. Not the film though, it’s the original source material. There’s the original comics of ‘Oldboy’ that they made the first film from. And that’s what we’re working from, not an adaptation of the film…,” said Smith.
In case you're wondering what the difference is between the film and the manga, almost everything outside of the main premise and a few plot points diverge wildly from one another. Park's film is more allegorical and sinister, more interested in moral questions than a mystery plot. Oh Dea-su is imprisoned for 15 years so he can be turned into a wild man being set up for a sick and twisted revenge. In the manga, Shinichi Goto is imprisoned for 10 years so he can be toyed with, more in common to David Fincher's The Game than Park's Oldboy. The motivation, tone and journey are completely different from the movie. The manga is more of an action-noir story, with an asskicking lead tearing through Japan's criminal underground.
Here's the important part: the manga has no forced incest. Rest easy, we're not going to see Spielberg take Will Smith into such a dark place. It's safe to say he won't eat a live squid either.
Adapting the original manga makes sense for them, because they get to avoid all the edgy material that made Oldboy a tough remake for American audiences, but they also get to say that they're more faithful to the original source material. Smart. The problem is, this is one of those rare cases where, like Ichi the Killer, the movie had a far more rabid fanbase than the original comic book, and any attempt to do the same premise would still invite comparison to Park Chan-wook's film. Especially since no one was really expecting an American remake of Oldboy to stay completely the same anyway.
