You don’t need to be a movie buff to know that toxic relationships should end.
You don’t need to be a movie buff to know that toxic relationships should end.
T he movies are full of painful breakups. But if you haven’t been paying attention to the box office over the past few months, you may have missed a fascinating development: Hollywood and China are now having a breakup of their own. It’s about time.
As of Monday, some of the biggest U.S. movies of the past few months have barely made a dent in China. Dune: Part Two, thus far the biggest movie in the U.S., is closing in on $280 million here. But it’s at around $50 million there. And Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom is at $65 million in China, half its U.S. gross. Some of that may be attributable to sequel fatigue and lack of audience interest in the now-defunct D.C. Extended Universe. But the original Aquaman made almost as much in China as it did in the U.S.
Something is going on. And it’s not just this year. Last year, not a single American film made the top ten in China’s box office. Chinese audiences cared little for the “Barbenheimer” pop-culture phenomenon of last summer; neither half of the portmanteau even made China’s top 30, according to the New York Times.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that, decades after The Fugitive inaugurated the modern era of Hollywood blockbusters in China, the country has built up a film industry of its own sufficient to cater to domestic demand. As Eric Schwartzel demonstrates in his excellent book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, this process mirrored China’s other attempts first to welcome, then to mimic, next to eject, and finally to defeat rival nations’ economic assets. (The Times adds that Joe Biden played a key role in the cinematic iteration of this process as vice president.) China, having learned what it can from Hollywood, no longer needs it.
Cultural differences are also beginning to matter more. As with virtually all aspects of Chinese society, the government heavily influences the film industry there. Official propaganda resources went into promoting The Battle at Lake Changjin, a revisionist (and historically suspect) account of China’s participation in the Korean War. As China grows more assertive and more capable of reflecting its own culture in film, it would probably be less trusting of and interested in American cultural products anyway. But America’s own (rightful) suspicion of China has contributed to this cultural separation.
It is no doubt inconvenient to Hollywood that the massive Chinese market is no longer the reliable source of revenue it once was. For much of the past decade-plus, American productions with huge budgets have counted on a heavy gross from China. So much so that some American movies, such as World of Warcraft, were made more with the Chinese market in mind than the American one: The 2016 movie flopped in the U.S. but made more than $200 million in China, where the game series on which the movie is based is still tremendously popular.
But that line in the Hollywood-accounting ledger has helped warp the American film industry. It has incentivized the kind of CGI-dominated, effects-driven spectacle that has become indistinguishable from video games. The rationale: The dumber something is, the easier it sells worldwide. As the Times put it, “Studios began to change the content of movies to appeal to Chinese ticket buyers. In: visual-effects-driven spectacles. Out: dialogue-heavy dramas and comedies.”
The political effect of a desire for Chinese-market access, however, has been even more damaging. There have been countless examples, in recent years, of American studios altering or outright eliminating elements of their movies, lest they risk the wrath of the Chinese government or the nation’s filmgoers. Perhaps the most notorious example was 2012’s Red Dawn remake (which shouldn’t have happened in the first place). That movie’s antagonists were altered from Chinese to North Korean, a change as blatant as it is nonsensical (who really thinks that a nation of racist dwarfs could take a drink from the Ohio?). This isn’t the first time Communism has corrupted Hollywood, but it has still had plenty of negative effects.
Yet these harms present an opportunity for Hollywood to make good on the separation that is already under way. As I wrote in 2021, “America should begin decoupling from China in every feasible economic dimension, starting with the film industry.” American audiences will turn out for good movies. Spider-Man: No Way Home, a bright spot in the beleaguered comic-book genre that spoke to genuine heroic ideals, made more than $800 million in the U.S. and almost $2 billion worldwide, despite never receiving a China release (in part because its studio refused to censor the Statue of Liberty from a pivotal scene). And Top Gun: Maverick (which also rebuffed Chinese demands for censorship, in this case relating to Taiwan), an unabashedly pro-American, pro-military film, was similarly successful, especially with some of our key allies. And the aforementioned Barbie and Oppenheimer, released last year, prove that unique, engaging movies of the sort that only this country can create can get people in theaters.
Hollywood could still blow this opportunity, of course. Decades of entrenchment and cross-pollination between America’s film industry and China’s can be hard to undo. But you don’t need to be a movie buff to know that toxic relationships should end.