Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) achieved only moderate success on its initial release in its home country of South Korea, where the film's extreme violence and apparent anti-commercial personal style alienated many mainstream audiences. When the film found international distribution, however, it attained much greater notoriety, winning a major prize at Cannes and attracting an unusually passionate and positive critical consensus. Oldboy also came to serve as a symbol for the growing East Asian ‘extreme’ cinema cycle, generating attention and a degree of visibility rare for a foreign-language cult film.

Oldboy tells the gruesomely violent tale of a man inexplicably imprisoned in isolation for fifteen years, released to seek an explanation from his captor and horrified by the revelations that follow. The film's significant cultural impact, coupled with its irresistible high-concept plot hook and weighty examination of the ‘universal’ theme of revenge, led, inevitably, to talk of a Hollywood remake. Given the financial success and critical prestige of contemporaneous remakes of ‘Asia Extreme’ films, such as Gore Verbinski's blockbuster horror The Ring (2002, based on the 1998 Japanese original) and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed (2006, based on the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs), an American Oldboy was seen as pregnant with potential. Initially mooted as a vehicle for director Steven Spielberg, the project ultimately fell to the much-celebrated but undeniably controversial auteur Spike Lee.

Spike Lee was in many ways an incongruous choice of director: for someone with a career characterised by authorial preoccupations with the African- American cultural experience and race relations in contemporary society, and a reputation for creative control and independence, a remake of a South Korean film struck many critics as odd. Yet Lee, in promoting the film through press interviews, exercised a strategy of claiming creative ownership, insisting his Oldboy was not a remake but a ‘reinterpretation’ (Hill 2013; Roberts 2013) and emphasising his personal investment in reshaping the material – a claim that would not endure rumours of creative conflict over the final cut of the film.