“Red Dawn” producer Tripp Vinson: "No one would distribute the film if the enemy was China"

Do you need anymore proof the Chinese own us? 

What makes this attack particularly surprising is that the nation behind it is North Korea, whose geographical location and general starvation-related discombobulation put it very far down on the ladder of potential threats to the American homeland. And what makes this surprise particularly awkward is that the nation staging the assault on the Starbucks-spangled landscape of the Pacific Northwest wasn’t supposed to be North Korea at all — in the remake’s original script, the invading forces were Chinese.

According to “Red Dawn” producer Tripp Vinson, the reasons for the switch were practical. “We had to make the change because the studio that originally financed the movie, MGM, went into bankruptcy, and came out of it without a distribution arm,” he says. “And to make a long story short, no one would distribute the film if the enemy was China. This was the reality we encountered. So we made changes to the opening sequence, did some slight editing and visual effects work, and changed the invading army from Chinese to North Koreans.”