"Making it their own, in fact, is the newest trend catching on among U.S. television studios trying to find new ways to push their programming in foreign markets. From local music tie-ins like Larage's to new versions of American hits produced overseas with local casts, studios are thinking globally but acting locally.
Disney announced a deal last week to produce four versions of Desperate Housewives in Latin America. The ladies of Wisteria Lane will be more than dubbed in Spanish. Hoping to replicate the worldwide success of the ABC dramedy the local editions will each have their own casts and cultural flavors in Spanish and Portuguese. "The script of the series perfectly fit the profile of what the Latin American audience looks like," Buena Vista International Television senior vice president Fernando Barbosa said. "It looks similar to telenovelas." Each local Desperate Housewives will follow the format of the U.S. show but be adapted to reflect local culture.
Producing local versions of popular American shows with local casts all over the world, known in the industry as "reversioning", could be a bonanza for studios, which count on sales to international markets to recoup the high cost of producing episodic television at home. In the 1990s Sony Television International pioneered reversioning with local productions of hits such as Married With Children and The Nanny as a way to counter a trend of scheduling U.S. shows in undesirable time slots far away from primetime. Today, Sony is expanding its productions throughout the world in markets as culturally different as Russia and China."
Read more on TIME.com
No comments:
Post a Comment