Germanizing Movies - That's not German! | Everything that sucks! And some things that don't. (2024)

This one's a relatively recent poster-child for this practice and I myself often forget which one's the original title and which one is the German one because both aren't that great. Truth be told, the movie isn't very good either. It has a couple of okay action sequences that suffer from its incredibly cheap look and the sleazy atmosphere kind of clashes badly with the simplistic worldview of the whole thing, leading to a weird tonal mess that isn't really fun. Anyway, it's called "Taken" in *stops to count* ten countries across the world but here in Germany, it's known by the name "96 Hours". Granted, Germany wasn't the only country to change the focus of the movie toward the time that Brian Mills (approximately) has to find and rescue his daughter. But other countries like Turkey, Croatia and Japan did at the very least translate that title into their national language (I think). Us Germans? No. No "96 Stunden" for us. Instead, "96 Hours" we got. And it doesn't stop there. The two sequels to the movie, "Taken 2" and "Taken 3" are called "96 Hours - Taken 2" and "96 Hours - Taken 3" in Germany. This is some weird shit...

In direct contrast, the German title-change of "3000 Miles To Graceland", the flawed yet interesting Elvis-themed crime-actioner that marked Kevin Costner's return to a more hardboiled breed of movies after about a decade of more family-friendly entertainment (and Costner is definitely the best thing about this movie... his portrayal of uber-psycho Murphy is ridiculously entertaining, the film itself is another tonal mess, though), comes across as almost sensible. Look, the problem I described in the intro-paragraph rears its ugly head. Was "Crime Is King" the tagline or the subtitle of the movie in its original? Either way, for the German release, they just switched both things around. The movie entered cinemas under the title "Crime Is King" and every now and then was subtitled or taglined as "3000 Meilen bis Graceland". Yeah, well, works. The film itself isn't remembered all that well anymore, because it came out the same year as "Ocean's Eleven" and got lumped in with that, although they are very different movies.

Here's the one for today that I haven't actually seen. But I've seen other movies by Andrzej Bartkowiak starring Jet Li that I can make an educated guess that this isn't really any good. "Romeo Must Die" wasn't very good and that one was at the very least halfway decently received by critics, but "Cradle 2 The Grave"? Nah. Probably not good either. Change my mind. Anyway, the title is weird. I know, it's not a sequel to anything and if you took the "Andrzej Bartkowiak directs action movies where martial artists are paired off with rap-musicians"-films as a franchise, this would be the third one (after "Romeo Must Die" and "Exit Wounds"), so the "2" in the title probably confused a bunch of people. So I would have understood if the German distributor changed the title in such a way that this would remove the number from it. But no. Instead, they renamed the movie to "Born 2 Die". Keeping the "2" in the title, keeping the "meaning" mostly intact but changing all of the words. Why? Maybe they didn't trust German moviegoers to understand complicated words like "cradle". We'll probably never know.

On the flipside, here's one that YOU probably haven't seen. Probably haven't even heard of, although it has a relatively prominent cast, featuring the likes of Eric Roberts, Tia Carrere, Joe Pantoliano (a.k.a. Johnny Pants), Tony Curtis, Chris Rock, William Forsythe and more, and was helmed by prolific '80s music video director Brian Grant. It's called "The Immortals", was released in 1995 and weirdly enough tries to connect the popular seventies/eighties-genre of mercenary-movies with the slowly re-emerging heist genre ("Heat" was around the corner). The result is a strange but kind of endearing little caper that has more drama than you would expect, especially considering its German title. I mean "The Immortals" is a weird title but it does make a bit of sense considering what the movie is actually about. German distributors were like "We don't know what the fuck to do with this", though, renaming the movie to "Gunpower" for the German release. "Gunpower". Fucking "Gunpower". What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Who the fuck is supposed to feel addressed by that?

Back to something more well known for today's finale: "Tomorrowland" by Brad Bird, starring George Clooney. Pretty shitty movie if you asked me. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that "Tomorrowland" wasn't called "Tomorrowland" in Germany, for reasons, I guess. What reasons? Hard to say. Maybe to avoid confusion with the Belgian electronic open air festival? Would make a certain amount of sense, because in Belgium and the Netherlands, the movie was renamed to "Project T" (full title in Belgium: "Disney Project T"... rolls right off the tongue) but I don't know if that's the real reason. Maybe it was because German audiences probably don't know the ride "Tomorrowland" that this is based on? Could be a possibility as well. There actually was a German title planned for this, originally. It was supposed to be called "Projekt: Neuland", "Project: New land", but two months before the movie was released, that title was scrapped and they settled on "A World Beyond". Which is about as bland as the original title, so... cool? I mean, it's a shit movie anyway, so who cares?

And that's it for today. Maybe I'll get to that "stupid subtitles added to the original title"-post in the future. We'll see. Hope you enjoyed this one and also that you enjoy going over to my Bandcamp-page and checking out my stuff. Here's a link: