With director David Fincher’s (The Social Network) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo remake right around the corner — a top candidate for the most unnecessary remake of all time — and abominable ideas such as a live-action, American remake of Japanese anime classic Akira coming down the pipeline, it seems now is as good a time as any to take a stand against Hollywood’s continuing addiction to Americanized remakes.

In recent years, it seems like every movie or television show that comes out is a remake of something else. Often there is no other reason than the film industry is prime to make a pretty penny. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a fantastic example — its trailers reveal a film nearly identical to the Swedish original released way, way back in 2009.

With such a quick turnaround you’d think stateside viewers are simply afraid of reading the subtitles, but alas, the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was already made for people too lazy to read the bestselling original novel of the same name.

In truth, “bestselling” is the only important factor with many of these remakes. If money wasn’t the motivation behind MTV’s atrocious Americanized version of the British teen drama Skins, then perhaps it was simply a social experiment in seeing how long people will watch garbage because a commercial told them to (thankfully, just one season).

While I can recognize the effort put into reinventing a show for a new audience, the fact that Hollywood has so much trouble getting it right is unnerving. In the past few years alone there have been too many Americanized remakes to count. If we stick with shows (all of which have been canceled) taken from the UK alone, we get 2011’s Free Agents, 2008’s Eleventh Hour and 2007’s Viva Laughlin.

The broad swath of BBC remakes doesn’t even take into account the even larger number of movies and shows adapted from the rest of the world.

It’s not impossible to have a good white-wash — Martin Scorcese’s (Hugo) The Departed is much better than its Hong Kong counterpart Infernal Affairs, and Showtime’s recent hit drama Homeland is an adaptation of the Israeli series Prisoners of War. But, overall, the lack of quality or portion control is unnerving.

Movies such as the abysmal U.S. retelling of Death at a Funeral simply defy explanation — what is the purpose of taking something great and making a lesser copy, in this case starring dead fish Martin Lawrence (Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son)?

On the other hand, there are films such as vampire drama Let Me In, a retelling on par with its original, Let the Right One In. Both are fine movies, but all that time, money and expertise could have put into creating an exciting, brand new story. At that point, audiences could have had two great movies instead of one great movie twice.   

Hollywood has a long history of white-washing films, so this isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. In the old days, new films didn’t even utilize race or culturally appropriate actors for its roles, atrocious lowlights including 1956 biopic The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

While we’ve made leaps and bounds since then, Hollywood would still have the world believe that we, the U.S. audience, are too xenophobic to enjoy great movies that don’t feature our own stars speaking our own slang. We can’t be bothered with foreign actors and languages.

Films are art, and the culture in which they are created is part of the experience. Hollywood can make all the movies it wants, but it doesn’t need to keep raiding other countries to find a good story. There’s plenty within the context of our own culture to draw from without having to force other countries stories into it.

berman@umdbk.com