“Scary” Localization

PLUS: National Emergency: TVs Still Have Motion Smoothing Turned On!

Author

Steve
June 16, 2026

Hello Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

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“Scary” Localization

I really enjoyed this Variety article demonstrating how the latest Scary Movie managed to scare up international big business (yes I should be shot for that pun, get in line!) through the arcane art of localization, even though the word localization doesn’t appear in the article!

…Paramount worked with the filmmakers not just on the promotional materials but the film itself to extend the popularity beyond the U.S. Those efforts went beyond dubbing audio in different languages to include adapting jokes and other details in the script. Such market-specific attention is more common in animation but less so for live-action films, because of the extra creative lift required.

We certainly can’t countenance any extra “creative lift” on our Hollywood productions. What do you think we’re producing here, art???

Light gags, nothing central to the plot, were tweaked in certain markets. In Brazil, for example, a reference to a U.S. serial killer was updated to refer to one who was familiar to Brazilian audiences. In Mexico, a throwaway line was rewritten around a viral TikTok from a woman in Yucatán, while another joke was reworked as an “albur,” a Mexican Spanish term for a double entendre.

Localization is a part of the business where it is obvious we have seen and will continue to see significant changes due to AI and the ease with which the executives making money decisions will think “oh we can just automate localization and and have it cost next to nothing,” instead of the localization itself being the driver of additional revenue. This is exemplified in this writeup of a localization panel at SlatorCon:

Nurminen talked about the danger of localization teams focusing on minimizing costs, and using cost savings as a performance metric. That makes the rest of the business see localization as a cost center, Nurminen said.

This is where the false comfort of a fully-automated system can weasel its way in. It’s a big missed opportunity to not identify opportunities to make your localized content more appealing to its endpoint or, even worse, produce audience-offending gibberish by excluding human eyes from examining the AI-generated localization to make sure it’s not hallucinating!

National Emergency: TVs Still Have Motion Smoothing Turned On!

This weekend I helped a friend set up his new Samsung UHD TV and we were horrified to discover that in the year 2026, TVs are still arriving with motion smoothing activated. The sacred words of Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie still go unheeded:

I’m half-joking, I know people use these for sports etc but I don’t understand why this is a feature that must be turned off instead of one that has to be turned on!

In less frustrating filmmaker video tutorials, I loved this breakdown from Boots Riley and his work with Panavision on getting the “big bold colors” of his film I Love Boosters.

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Fox wants to take over your TV, and the tech inside it. (link)

Is Apple TV the new HBO? (link)

Why Lionsgate embraced physical media. (link)