DreamWorks has positioned "Kung Fu Panda 3" to top not one, but two box office markets when it releases this weekend.
The movie's English version was re-scripted, re-voiced, and re-animated for a wholly distinct version, which will come out in China just as the English version releases in America. You can see DreamWorks's approach via the two trailers in this post — they're practically identical, but one is entirely in Mandarin, and the characters really look like they're speaking Mandarin.
Melissa Cobb has produced all three of the "Kung Fu Panda" movies, and she was recently named the Head of Studio and Chief Creative Officer at Oriental DreamWorks. When Cobb joined us on The Frame, she talked about the advantages of making two distinct versions of the same movie.
Interview Highlights:
Let's talk about the two different versions of "Kung Fu Panda 3" that are being released. There's one in English here, and there's one in Mandarin in China. And these weren't just dubbed — you made two different versions of the film, right?
Yeah, that's correct. Normally, a film would be dubbed into dozens of different languages, but in this case, we didn't just do a straight translation of the movie. We actually adapted the script to take into account different cultural things between the Mandarin and the US version, and then we cast a great cast in China, re-recorded the movie, and then we re-animated all of the character animations.
When you talk about re-animation, that's about getting the mouth movements to match the way in which Mandarin is spoken, so it doesn't look like a badly-dubbed "Godzilla" movie from the 1960s.
[laughs] Hopefully it doesn't look like a badly-dubbed anything. We were really able to capture the performances of the Mandarin cast, and you really feel that when you watch it. It was quite extraordinary for me, and I don't speak Mandarin, but watching the characters now speaking in another language, I felt like I was watching the movie for the very first time.
I want to talk about the bigger role of China. China will soon become the biggest box office market in the world. What are DreamWorks' plans writ large in China going forward?
Oriental DreamWorks is set up as an ongoing studio, so the first thing that we did there was this co-production on "Kung Fu Panda," which is really an opportunity to ramp the crew into big feature, animation production. But going forward, the idea is to continue to make films for the worldwide market out of that studio in Shanghai.
The first "Kung Fu Panda" did about $26 million in China in 2008, and then the second movie grossed about $92 million in 2011. I know you're not going to give us a box office prediction, but how optimistic are you about the film's prospects in China?
[laughs] I can't put a number on my optimism, but I hope that people there embrace it as much as they did the first two movies. It's an incredible experience to fly halfway around and have people who know and love your movie. It's incredibly emotionally rewarding, so we cross our fingers and hope all the families in China will go see what we think is a great family movie.