Pursuing and maintaining access to the Chinese market has become a top priority for many in the entertainment industry. The same can’t be said for Netflix.
Actor Adam Sandler recently revealed that Netflix asked him to change the setting of his film Hustle from China to somewhere in Latin America or Europe because Netflix doesn’t operate in China, resulting in the film now being set in Spain. According to Sandler, “It was written originally that I find a player in China, and somehow, Netflix is not in China.”
Indeed, Netflix is not in China. Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings said last year that “we have not been spending any time on China in the last couple years.” The company had been “turned down by the Chinese government several years ago.”
“There’s so much opportunity for us in Asia, the rest of Asia — India, in particular, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, and then all through Europe and Latin America,” Hastings said.
Netflix’s absence in China hasn’t been for lack of trying. In 2017, Netflix agreed to license some of its original content to the Chinese streaming platform iQiyi, though that agreement ended within two years.
Despite this, Netflix has been doing just fine. In the second quarter of 2021, the company saw its subscriber base increase by more than 1.5 million, led by a net gain of over 1 million subscribers in the Asia-Pacific region.
It’s a notable contrast to Disney, as its Marvel films look to be shut out in 2021. Since 2013, Marvel films have typically made between 10% and 20% of their box-office sales in China, but, despite all of Marvel’s pandering, its latest slate of films have struggled to attain the Chinese government’s approval.
As Netflix continues to show, you don’t need to debase yourself by pandering to China’s genocidal regime to succeed in the entertainment industry. There are surely plenty of things about which to criticize Netflix, but, mercifully, shamefully pursuing access to the Chinese market at all costs is not one of them.
