Marvel has entered new territory after Avengers: Endgame took the world by storm. But the newest stage of Marvel films is having a tough time reaching the lucrative market of China.
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has tried to assure Chinese audiences repeatedly that the Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would not be offensive. Feige has had to deal with concerns about the comic book version of Shang-Chi, including the character’s father being a stereotypical character named Fu Manchu and Shang-Chi “sometimes abandoning his Chinese roots to embrace the West.”
Feige’s pandering comes across as desperate. “It is a flaw to run away to the West and to hide from his legacy and his family,” he said in an interview. “That’s how the movie is presented.”
Marvel clearly thought this film would be a huge success in China. Feige even promoted it during his faux apology for whitewashing a Tibetan character in the 2016 film Doctor Strange. But the film does not appear to have been approved by China just yet. And it isn’t the only one.
Marvel’s Black Widow, released in early July, still does not have a release date in China and likely won’t get one. Eternals, the next film up after Shang-Chi, is directed by Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao, who was born in China. Zhao’s Oscar victories were blacked out in China, likely as a result of her criticism of China as a place “where there are lies everywhere” in 2013.
The Global Times, a Chinese state-run paper, said Eternals would face an uphill battle to be shown in China given Zhao’s past comments. If both that film and Shang-Chi miss the cut, that would be three-straight Marvel films being shut out of the market that made Avengers: Endgame its most successful foreign film ever, to the tune of $603 million.
Marvel has tried desperately to stay on the good side of Chinese censors, including the aforementioned whitewashing of a Tibetan character in Doctor Strange and the production of Iron Man 3 bringing in Chinese regulators to ensure that the film could stay eligible. It’s unclear how the relationship became rocky, but the New York Times reported on the Chinese backlash to Zhao’s comments in March, which could have begun the apparent blackballing of Marvel films.
Perhaps now Marvel and its parent company, Disney, could find their moral backbones and stop bending to every whim of China’s thin-skinned genocidal regime. Pandering to China is bad enough, but unsuccessfully pandering to China is downright embarrassing. Disney and Marvel, and Feige, are not strapped for cash. Perhaps they should reconsider selling out their own morality just to get rejected by China.
