How China conquered Hollywood

Few corporate sagas can top Hollywood’s sordid and ultimately unsuccessful love affair with China. Tinseltown, the neighborhood where the mecca of cinema is located, detects a lucrative opportunity in the People’s Republic and begins to court for decades what becomes the biggest box office in the world. But things turn sour, and Disney and other studios face a hostile Beijing and rising nationalism. Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy), by Erich Schwartzel, is a classic cautionary tale that has yet to be fully developed.

The Los Angeles office of WSJ it’s an unusual vantage point from which to view China’s rise. But Schwartzel, who joined as the newspaper’s film correspondent in 2013, “soon began to see China everywhere.” Thus begins an extraordinary narrative that moves from the Burbank offices to Qingdao, the eastern hollywood from China, and to a remote Kenyan village where locals obsessively watch kung fu performances. Schwartzel crafts a riveting and timely tale of how Hollywood’s once-promising relationship with its biggest market has gone terribly wrong.

Its opening scene is set in happier times. In 2008, a rising China, still basking in the glitter of hosting the summer Olympics, sends a group of executives to Los Angeles for a crash course in the film industry, with a mandate to recreate success. from Hollywood. Months earlier, Robert Iger, then CEO of Disney, met with Chinese authorities to discuss the construction of a park in Shanghai, an agreement that he himself promoted as “the greatest opportunity the company has had since Walt Disney himself bought land in central Florida. That same year, James Cameron’s film Avatar broke records by selling $2.7 billion worth of tickets. Of this figure, 202 million came from Chinese theaters, four times more than the previous record, set by Titanics.

Chinese money flooded Tinseltown. The first was billionaire Wang Jianlin, whose real estate conglomerate Dalian Wanda [que patrocina el estadio del Atlético de Madrid] it acquired the movie theater chain AMC Entertainment for $2.6 billion and the US studio Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion a few years later. He even considered paying 4,000 million for 49% of Paramount Pictures, of Viacom. The odd cast of Chinese benefactors reached absurd levels when copper specialist Anhui Xinke New Materials announced his plans to buy studio Voltage Pictures, known for producing Oscar-winning films. the hurt Locker Y Dallas Buyers Club.

But the honeymoon is over. In 2016, the Chinese box office was bigger than the UK, Japan and India combined, while the US box office stagnated as viewers flocked to competitors like Netflix. Hollywood studios have become increasingly dependent on Chinese viewers, putting executives at the mercy of Beijing’s policies. The People’s Republic admits no more than 34 imported films per year and limits foreign studios’ share of box office receipts to 25%. A Beijing crackdown on “irrational” overseas investment in 2017 also derailed numerous financing deals, including Paramount’s $1 billion deal with two Chinese firms and Anhui Xinke’s ill-fated diversification.

The shift in the balance of power is evident in Hollywood bowing to the Chinese censorship regime. Schwartzel’s anecdotes, sometimes ridiculous, are very valuable. The vague bans on all things supernatural, vulgar and immoral left movie executives in the dark. Actor Chris Pratt’s bare butt was cut from a film, while harry potter and the Philosopher’s Stone references to the word magician were removed. Warner tried to pass off the killer clown from Item by an alien, in a futile attempt to circumvent China’s ban on on-screen ghosts.

The ideological implications of China’s economic might are worrying. It’s been years since any Hollywood blockbuster has chosen a Chinese character as a villain. MGM’s 2012 reboot of Red Dawn, depicting an invasion of the US, was meant to show American teenagers fending off Chinese invaders. However, the studio made a last-minute misstep and paid a special effects company $1 million after filming was finished to replace the Chinese flags with North Korean ones. Schwartzel notes that since then, no major studio release has “portrayed the Chinese government as the bad guy, or life there as anything less than world-class megacities.”

Now, an emboldened and assertive Beijing is actively projecting its soft power on developing countries like Kenya. Meanwhile, firms like Disney, whose recent Marvel releases have not yet been approved in China, are struggling to compete with local blockbusters. In the pandemic, the Chinese box office remained the largest in the world, at $7.4 billion in 2021, according to official figures. But 8 of the 10 highest grossing titles were made in the country, including the war epic The Battle of Changjin Lakewhich grossed a domestic record $903 million and became the world’s second-highest-grossing film of 2021, according to Box Office Mojo.

Still, things could be changing. The latest lockdowns in China have set negative box office records for the past 10 years. Hollywood may be losing patience. A 2019 trailer of Top Gun: Maverick, for example, removed the Taiwanese flag patch from Tom Cruise’s iconic pilot’s jacket from the first film. But in the final version, Paramount Pictures put it back on, which probably doomed any chance of a guaranteed Chinese release. Executives may not care. After all, the sequel could be Tom Cruise’s first vehicle to earn more than a billion dollars, and it will reach that figure without any help from China.