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This article analyzes the industrial and cultural dynamics of transnational film remakes, focusing on the recent rise of remake rights representatives and the production of comedy remakes for local-language markets. Through the use of in-depth interviews with remake rights representatives and the analysis of primary and secondary sources, we scrutinize the strategies of these players in mediating the production processes of remaking foreign popular films into local-language hits. The article takes on two tasks: First, it dissects the work of the different agents at play in buying and selling remake rights and examines their business models and tactics; second, it looks at the generic contents that these agents are circulating through selected catalogs. In this context, comedy becomes a privileged interface to link diverse national markets and manufacture an ideal of proximity, whereby foreign popular comedies – unknown to local audiences – are remade with a local flavor and presented as 'new' national hits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of Dutch-Flemish film remaking that came into existence in the new millennium quickly appeared to be of great importance in the film industries of Flanders and The Netherlands – and consequently of Europe. Inspired by methods used in television (format) studies, this article conducts a systematic comparative film analysis of nine Dutch-Flemish remakes together with their nine source films. Considering the remake as a prism that aids in dissecting different formal, transtextual, and cultural codes, and subsequently embedding the practice in its specific socio-cultural and industrial context, we found several similarities and differences between the Dutch and Flemish film versions and showed how these can be made sense of. More generally, we distilled two encompassing principles that administer the remake practice: even though a great deal of the remake process can be explained through the concept of localization – or, more precisely, through the concepts of 'manufacturing proximity' and 'banal aboutness' – we found that it should certainly not be limited to these processes – as both (trans)textual, such as the mechanism of 'filling in the gaps', and contextual elements were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]