Last weekend, the highly anticipated film Barbie
made a killing
at the global box office. One country where it didn’t do so well, however, was
China
.
That’s unfortunate for the producers, who worked so hard to please Beijing, only to watch the film come in
sixth place
in opening-day ticket sales in China. Though viewership has picked up in recent days, its lackluster performance to date should serve as a warning to Hollywood studios seeking to crack the Chinese market.
Barbie sparked a scandal earlier this month when
Vietnam banned the film
over a scene involving a crayon-drawn map of the world that appeared to depict the “nine-dash line,” a cartographic feature Beijing uses to exert its
unlawful
territorial claims over most of the South China Sea, including territory also claimed by Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. Warner Bros., which released the film, denied the dashed line next to a continent labeled “Asia” was a reference to the controversial feature. Nevertheless, the scene earned harsh
criticism from influential figures
in Washington.
Whether or not the studio wittingly supported Beijing’s claims,
Barbie
is only the latest film to show what seems obvious to everyone except Hollywood studios—that censoring (or in this case, including) content on behalf of the
Chinese Communist Party
is not worth the trouble.
For two decades, Hollywood studios have gone to
great lengths to please Beijing
. This is partly due to China’s strict quotas on foreign films, which force studios to compete for access to what is now the world’s largest movie market. They do this by procuring Chinese partners and investors, giving Chinese actors screen time, and developing storylines they think will appeal to Chinese audiences. They also curate content to please the CCP censors who must approve every cultural product released in the country.
Paramount Pictures’ initial decision to remove the Taiwanese and Japanese flags from protagonist Pete Mitchell’s jacket in
Top Gun: Maverick
was a classic example of this pandering. Paramount later reversed the decision after the departure of a Chinese investor and the studio’s belated recognition that, with U.S.-China tensions at record highs, there was little chance Beijing would approve a film that glorifies the American military.
Even more outrageous are the attempts to please Beijing by inserting CCP propaganda narratives into scripts. This isn’t always as obvious as in Columbia Pictures’ 2009 film “
2012
,” which literally showed China saving humanity. The stunt helped the film briefly become the
highest-grossing movie
ever in China, though it’s been far surpassed every year since then.
Subtler forms of propaganda, such as the nine-dash line in Barbie and in
Dreamworks’
Abominable
, seek to court Beijing in ways that are less noticeable. But people are noticing, and they don’t like what they see.
The great irony is that all this
effort to please Beijing
often doesn’t even pay off. Hollywood studios have never made the kind of money they hoped to in China, where they are only permitted to take
25% of box office revenues
, compared with 50% in the U.S. and 40% in other countries.
In recent years, they’ve had even more difficulty in the country, as domestic studios inside China churn out productions more attuned to the interests of local moviegoers and with quality that is closing the gap with Hollywood. And things are only getting worse. Hollywood films experienced a
69% drop in Chinese ticket sales
the first half of this year, compared with 2019, the last year before the market was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And that only accounts for the lucky films that are allowed to screen in China in the first place, which is far from guaranteed. For instance, Marvel’s 2021 film
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
was made to order for the Chinese market, but Beijing never gave it a license.
Those that do manage to be released in China often do so at a great cost. Disney’s live-action version of Mulan was released in China to great fanfare, but it offended much of the world in the process.
Hong Kong democracy advocates
boycotted the film after its Chinese-American lead actress, Liu Yifei, posted on social media in support of the Hong Kong Police Force’s 2019 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Meanwhile, the broader international community was horrified to see the film’s credits thank Chinese government entities implicated
in the Uyghur genocide
in the Xinjiang region, where part of it was filmed.
After all this trouble,
Chinese moviegoers were unimpressed
with the film’s bungling of historical and cultural context. Disney literally tripped over itself to make Mulan a success in China, and
it fell on its face
.
Top Gun: Maverick, on the other hand, showed it didn’t need the China market. After reversing its initial decision to censor the protagonist’s bomber jacket, the film earned well over $1 billion and became
Paramount Pictures’ highest-grossing film ever
.
In fact, not only does catering to the CCP not help studios crack the China market, it increasingly carries risks, as Barbie discovered in Vietnam.
Barbie was not the first film banned because of the nine-dash line—
Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines
have banned others in recent years, with Abominable being the most prominent example.
The U.S. Defense Department last month implemented
new rules
prohibiting any production assistance for directors who comply with Chinese censorship demands. If enforced, that could seriously hurt films with military themes, which depend on various forms of Pentagon assistance—such as access to military bases and technical expertise—to ensure the accuracy and authenticity needed to create blockbusters.
That’s a good start, and other government agencies should follow suit. Officials should also push for greater transparency with respect to studios’ dealings with the CCP.
A
report by the Heritage Foundation
in March called on Congress to organize public hearings and exercise subpoena power to force U.S. firms and cultural enterprises to explain cases of self-censorship. Such transparency measures would increase the reputational cost to studios of cooperating with the CCP and help Hollywood realize what a bad deal Beijing is giving them.
At the end of the day, Hollywood studios are profit-oriented businesses and will continue catering to China as long as they think it’s in their interest to do so. But it’s increasingly the case that pandering to China doesn’t help—and may even hurt—their bottom line. It’s time they woke up to this truth.
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This article originally appeared in the Daily Signal and is reprinted with kind permission from the Heritage Foundation.
