Hollywood’s China Breakup Is Long Overdue

O ne hesitates to be too judgmental when a serially abused spouse finally starts to understand what is going on, to take steps to exit the relationship, and to proceed with what promises to be a happier and healthier mode of existence. But when that victim is Hollywood, which invited abuse by selling out every supposed value in its grotesquely unseemly scramble for Chinabucks, perhaps a wry smile is at least in order.

China is a place that murders babies by the million (both before and after birth) for the crime of being female, puts Uyghur Muslims in prison reeducation camps, ruthlessly represses speech and (perhaps most objectionably to Hollywood) frowns on references to homosexuality. Yet the movie industry was willing to overlook all of this, seemingly indefinitely, because every time it thought about pushing back, the phrase “world’s largest movie market” flashed through its head.

Even today, as major Hollywood releases fail to earn official Chinese approval for a second straight year, the rupture is largely coming from the Chinese side. Under the increasingly dogmatic rule of Xi Jinping, who is even banning boy bands because they consist of “sissy” men, the restrictions on American imports to the Chinese theatrical motion-picture market are getting so absurd that Hollywood is starting, albeit with great sorrow and reluctance, to detach its tongue from the Chinese Communist Party’s boots.

Top Gun: Maverick is not being released in China, at least not theatrically. Why? Who knows? China never gives reasons why it’s banning American products. Apparently, they thought the movie was too jingoistic about the U.S. military — even though its script goes into contortions to avoid mentioning which rogue country is home to the uranium centrifuge Maverick seeks to destroy. Top Gun: Maverick will instead be available to everyone in China who wishes to see it via pirated videos from which Hollywood’s total revenue will be $0. China does not now do and never has done anything to impede this wholesale theft of intellectual property, and Hollywood is so meek about China it doesn’t even bother to complain.

Last year, China blocked Hollywood’s biggest release of the year, Spider Man: No Way Home, because it objected to the use of the Statue of Liberty as iconography in the climactic scenes of the film. Appeasing China in this case would have meant making a completely different film.

Before that, China banned the entire 2021 Marvel movie slate, even Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which purposely pandered to the Chinese market. The only one of last year’s top five American movies to play in China was F9, and that was only after the movie’s star, John Cena, who has spent years studying Mandarin, prostrated himself in the most nauseating way by begging forgiveness for referring to Taiwan as “a country.” F9 went on to gross $217 million in China — more than it earned in North America, although Hollywood lets China keep 75 cents of every dollar its films earn there. Still, that’s $54 million of pure profit added to the movie’s bottom line. Even in a billion-dollar business, that’s real money.

But Hollywood is coming to the sad realization that pursuing Chinese money is not worth the creative and moral cost. Disney effusively thanked several different arms of the Chinese police state in Xinjiang Province — gracias, Gestapo! — in the credits of 2020’s Mulan, a movie built to appeal to China, and the Communist Party banned it anyway. China demanded that Sony censor Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood for its unflattering portrayal of Bruce Lee — and Lee was not even a Chinese national. (He was born in San Francisco and raised in British Hong Kong.) Tarantino refused, and Sony properly told China to stuff it. The same movie could easily have been banned for a different nonsensical reason: It starred Brad Pitt, whose movies were banned from China for years because he had starred in Seven Years in Tibet.

China banned The Dark Knight (the problem was a scene with a Hong Kong money launderer), Ghostbusters (no ghosts allowed), Deadpool (too violent), Noah (prophecy is a no-no), and Joker (too dark? Who knows? R-rated movies generally don’t get released in China unless they are cleaned up).

Meanwhile, American consumers are beginning to be disgusted by Hollywood’s partnership with an evil empire and to notice the double standard. Appeasing China will cost Hollywood some brand value. This spring, as Disney was making a fuss about a Florida law that bars teachers from bringing up sexuality among little kids, Warner Bros. was mollifying China by removing gay references from Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore — whose title character is gay, at least in the original version. The Warner statement was classic corporate doublespeak: “We’re committed to safeguarding the integrity of every film we release, and that extends to circumstances that necessitate making nuanced cuts in order to respond sensitively to a variety of in-market factors.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s censors are now the “integrity safeguarding” lads. The movie went on to gross $28 million in China, only $7 million of which goes back to WB. Was it worth it? China has made itself a cultural pariah, and Hollywood doesn’t need to continue grinding its principles to dust to be its partner.