Breja: I have to say, I can't understand how you can watch movies dubbed. You're losing half the actors' actuall work. I always avoid dubbing like the plague. I see it creeping in more and more. It used to be only animated movies got dubbed here, now many others do to, like Star Wars and the Marvel movies, but there is still always an un-dubbed version too. For now. If ever there is only a dubbed version, I'll just have to stop going to the cinema alltogether.
We don't really have a lot of choice in Germany - most cinemas only show the dubbed versions and that's it. Some cinemas do one English-language showing of a popular film a week and that's it. Those cinemas seem to have pretensions that showing a film in its original language makes that cinema somehow "sophisticated".
To be honest, German cinemas are among the worst I've seen in Europe - absolutely no sense of quality or culture, generally seeking to appeal to the lowest common denominator and completely tone-deaf to the demands of their clientele, which is why the cinema industry here has been on a constant downwards spiral economically ever since the early 2000s. We're also possibly the only country where cinemas also try to "force" 3D versions onto its audiences. It was quite funny coming out of Star Wars because a 3D showing was finishing up in the screen opposite our 2D showing, and there were two people sat there versus our completely booked-out showing.
I know most other countries at least show films in the original language alongside dubbed versions (and some, like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, don't show dubbed films at all, except for kids' stuff), in this respect Germany is very backwards.
Of course, Eastern Europe is a unique case - in Poland in particular, many films were only available with a voice-over narrator (and this remains to date with TV series as far as I'm aware) because it simply wasn't cost-effective to dub films - they were just coming out of communism, not many people had money, and having one guy read all of the translations was much cheaper than hiring a professional dubbing team. Subtitled versions were better able to establish themselves on the market before proper dubbing became a thing, so it seems to have stuck (just watched the Polish-dubbed TFA trailer, found it hilarious how they apparently struggled to fit "Gwiezdne Wojny" on the screen :) ).
We do have an option to see films in English in a cinema in Hamburg (about an hour from us), for which we will be seeing the 70mm version of The Hateful Eight in English. But it's a long trek for the "non-event" films where we just want to spend a relaxed evening.
Edit: Just discovered the
"Student Dub" of A New Hope :) :) :)
