I know zilch about movies, unfortunately. I imagine it has its own different set of concerns. I couldn’t do any more than speculate with WAGs.
You do know we’re on a message board, right? Shoot, I’m not posting anything more than wild ass guesses myself. 
I suspect that movies are far more mass market in general (not always). That said, LotR or Star Wars or Titanic are crammed with British accents, and they cause no problem. The King’s Speech did well, as do the Hugh Grant rom coms. So there’s clearly a viable market space.
Well, my wild ass guess for movies is that Hollywood Studios demand a “name” to “open” the movie. I suppose there are several British actors and actresses that could conceivably open a non-American movie, but those actors and actresses are already Hollywood. Do they even do British Movies? (I honestly don’t know).
So these foreign films seems to have the major “drawback” of not having a recognizable Hollywood name to open the movie (talk shows and all that jazz).
I don’t doubt your experience, it just… doesn’t make sense to me.
What about the suggestions I made after 3 minutes of thinking about the problem? Were they brought up and shot down? Surely people who do this for a living have better ideas than I do about making this work, but it seems like even the really simple ones I had would be sufficient.
There are British movies that have name actors and are released directly in the American market and do well. Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually come to mind. I’m sure there are others.
I’m not buying season/series length as the sole reason. A factor, sure, but not an insurmountable one. I mean, the first season of Walking Dead was a mere 6 episodes. And there have been other US series with similarly short seasons from time to time. Not the norm, but certainly something that does happen.
Production values, funny accents, cultural references that wouldn’t make sense, all this stuff has to be a major factor as well.
And it’s not like the shows don’t show up in the US at all, they just show up as a niche product. Sure Syfy has the Americanized Being Human, but at practically the same time they were airing the first season, BBCA was airing the most recent series of the British original.
You say Doctor Who doesn’t get remade, and that may well be, but it’s not because it has the right number of episodes, it’s because they’re much more protective of the property than they would be of Life On Mars. And they actually did let an Americanized version get made once, sort of, though it wasn’t really a remake more of a continuation. The way that went (not well) probably makes them never even willing to consider it again.
Also, someone mentioned the comparison of the fx on Terra Nova vs Primeval, and while you’re absolutely right, the fx on Primeval actually has improved quite a bit from when it started. Early on it was pretty damn laughable, but in the finale of the most recent series, the fx was quite good. Particularly a fight with (what I think was) a T-Rex. But even the “future predators” looked much better than they had in earlier series. It just seemed like the last few series had a much higher fx budget, or maybe they just got better CGI guys, I dunno.
Both Psycho’s are in 1.85:1
Don’t be confused - Psycho was lately released in a shitty-looking 1.85:1 version for the sort of mouth-breathing morons who feel like something is wrong if a movie doesn’t take up as much of their screen as possible. However, it was originally composed for and released as 1.37:1.
The 1.85.:1 Blu-ray version of Hitchcock’s Psycho is as far from the Hitchcock’s intent as Van Sant’s pointless exercise. Watch this movie on DVD until they get their shit together enough to release a hi-def version in its original aspect ratio. Here is a representative example of the sort of liberties taken with Hitchcock’s composition in this transfer. Seriously, don’t bother with it!
[QUOTE=Larry Mudd;14621402[Here]
(psycho3 | Comparison of the 1.33:1 full frame(ish) transfer … | Flickr) is a representative example of the sort of liberties taken with Hitchcock’s composition in this transfer. Seriously, don’t bother with it!
[/QUOTE]
Wow! I had no idea. Now I’m wondering what aspect ratio I’ve seen Psycho in.
I have seen both Let Me In and Let The Right One In. I loved Let Me In and it is one of my favorite movies. Let The Right One In just didn;t have the right atmosphere. It reminded me of an 80’s B movie. It felt cold and distant. And not in a good way. In a way that made me not want to watch it. And I connected with the characters in LMI and I didn;t with the ones in LTROI.
And I have no problems with foreign movies. Pan’s Labyrinth is also one of my favorite movies.
Wrong. Virtually no films were being released in Academy by 1960, let alone by a major studio. Wide screen processes were ubiquitous and while Hitchcock shot accounting for full frame (a wise choice because he knew TV transfers would be easier that way), there’s no evidence that the film was intended that way for release (though 1.85 I’ll agree is too wide).
Though I do not doubt that the season length is a major issue, even if the words translate, the culture and cultural cues often do not.
When you walk down the street, you can make instant judgments about people based on the way they dress, stand, walk, what slang they use. When you look at an office, you can tell certain things about the company. When you see someone’s home, you can learn a great deal about the people who live there. Set and costume designers know this. They make use of the visual medium to tell us a lot about the characters without the characters even bothering to say a word. Class markers can be especially hard to interpret. When I watch English and Australian shows, little things like that don’t work. I’ll see an English show and think “they seem to have too much money to have a kitchen that small.” Or “why is he dressing like that?” And I don’t know if that’s average or if the designers are trying to make a point about that specific character or situation.
Cultural norms don’t always work, either. Based on the shows I’ve seen, British offices and office culture is distinctly different than American offices and office culture. But I’m not sure what’s being done for the sake of humor, what’s done for the sake of drama, and what’s just the way things are. And obviously, the show isn’t going to waste time with exposition on those points because everyone who the show was designed for already knows. Or another example, I recently saw an Australian show where a person still in college handed a CV to a potential employer for an entry level job that was like 6 pages long and had a title page - in a report cover. On the show, they seemed to think of that as normal. On an American show, that same resume would have been a giant red flag about the employee.
When shows get remade, they make adjustments for culture and standards and norms.
Slight side track, but can anyone explain to me why the US release of the BBC’s Planet Earth was re-dubbed, if US audiences don’t have trouble understanding UK accents?
Money is the answer to this question. Americans will pay money to see their favorite actors in well produced movies. Americans, with some exceptions, will not see foreign movies with actors they are not familiar with. Big bucks to be made with a successful movie made in the USA.
You’ll be surprised by the answer to that. Suffice it to say that some very established and stubborn people have separate licensing agreements for their narration than for the footage itself, despite rumours to the contrary. It certainly helps perpetuate the accent myth, though.
And about ten versions of The Nanny.
No it isn’t, I tend to watch anything from Britain with subtitles on. There’s been threads in the past where quite a few posters said the same.
Well, I don’t believe you’re dumb, even if you do! 
A lot of very expensive focus groups don’t, either. Lord of the Rings, Rome, Doctor Who, Love Actually, The King’s Speech, Titanic, Bond movies, Pirates of the Carribean, Harry Potter - that’s just a very short list that pops to the top of my head when thinking of British accented stuff that has played well in the US. These things are by no means unusual. As a whole, accent has proved not to be an impediment on a commercial scale.
You must have noticed that things that play well to a wide North American audience tend not to stray very far from “safe” accents which are nearly universally easily apprehended, with dialog which is unlikely to contain any bits which would be opaque to even the most insulated person.
This doesn’t really compare well with, say, a series like Shameless, with its naturalist presentation of Manchester and Lancashire accents and dialect, chockablock with regional idioms. When the original played over here, it was well-received among.. well.. anglophiles - but it never had a chance at attracting a really wide audience. Much better (from a network’s point of view) to set it in an American city and cast someone with name recognition to draw viewers.
You’re talking extremes there, though. That type of show isn’t prime export material in either direction. There are extremities of any statistical range, but they’re not really what I’m talking about.
I mean, you can dispute it, sure; or provide examples or anecdotes. I can only tell you what we did; and that it was a decade ago. Other than that, I can’t really provide any more.