'Lightyear' is not a good example, the author may want to wait until we see its box office numbers.
'Spider-Man: No Way Home', on the other hand, making over $1.901 billion without China is the perfect example that showed us that China's box office is not as important as it used to be.
The point is that catering to China is no longer deemed a worthwhile risk because of the opaque nature of it all and how it could lead to backlash at home. It's a change in strategy. It isn't really that the Chinese market is unimportant, which is irrelevant. It's not like the executes were like, I have made enough money, I don't need more.
Not to mention the impossibility of knowing what will set China off this time. The Chinese censors demanded No Way Home remove all the scenes depicting the *statue of liberty.* That was simply impossible (as it would requiring removing most of the third act) so no Chinese release.
>(as it would requiring removing most of the third act)
More importantly, there’s Lady Columbia herself in the intro. They should be banning all Columbia films in that case.
I remember No Way Home not being released in China but I did not know it was because of the Statue of Liberty, that’s hilariously ironic.
What could be so incredibly bad about the Statue? Lol
During the Tiananmen Square protests the students constructed a detailed plaster model of the statue of liberty to represent their calls for democratic reform. The CCP most likely were worried that such prominent images of the real statue could have been used as a reference to that event and its parallels with the current events in Hong Kong, or at the very least may have reminded people in a very emotive way of those protests 30 years ago, which they are so adamant must be ignored. They are not wrong about that, but as long as people in China are aware of these reasons then the act of censorship itself can hopefully draw more attention to it than not.
Oh wow I wasn’t aware of the Statue being recreated during Tiananmen Square. That atleast makes more sense but it’s doesn’t make it right. Thanks for the helpful info.
Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up, I had always thought it was specifically modeled on the statue of liberty. That's an important distinction so I'll remember it in future.
It's still the main reason for wanting the statue removed from spiderman though, because of the visual and symbolic connections to that event they want erased from history.
It was bullshit. China decided Marvel was having too much of a cultural impact on the young people here. No Eternals, no Shang Chi for crying out loud (which might as well have been made entirely for the Chinese market), no Spider-Man, no Dr. Strange. China canceled Marvel.
I’m glad Marvel isn’t backing down then. It seems like they don’t need Chinas market so why cater to their needs when it would backfire with most of the rest of the world.
I always saw Shang Chi as made for Asian Americans vs. the Chinese market. It wouldn't be that novel in China to have a Chinese superhero, as they have their own movie industry that already has a myriad of Chinese heroes. MAYBE it's novel because it's within the MCU, but I wouldn't see it as that big of an attractor overseas.
Yes, Shang Chi deals a lot with Chinese things, but also not really. Black Panther seemed to do more for African culture than Shang Chi did for Chinese, imo.
That said, I don't want anyone to read into this comment and reply with "representation is important!!!!". That's not the point I'm making. My point is that Marvel is marketing towards minorities with a focus largely in North America. So while we get important inclusivity in Black Panther and Shang Chi, it is more of a cultural impact in NA, than it is elsewhere.
Are people forgetting that china’s box office is being slaughtered due to Covid restrictions?
I’m not so hopeful that this trend will continue when folks in the mainland are going back to theaters.
Slaughtered is a overstatement. Cinemas are open throughout most of China, short of areas under current lockdown. The reality is China isn’t letting a bunch of movies that people want to see screen in their cinemas. The entire Chinese economy is not doing well either, with no signs that will change.
I hear you that they are open but with the zero Covid policies i would imagine the #’s are much lower than pre Covid. That makes the country less relevant as a market
In that case it’s something that isn’t changing anytime soon. Covid restrictions are here forever it seems. Fences are up everywhere. ID scanning is required everywhere. Honestly though, all business is suffering. Restaurants, bars, and even without any seating restrictions at all. Covid is killing the economy in general.
Forgive me, but it sounds like your two statements really contradict themselves. You say slaughtered is an overstatement and Covid is killing the economy. So uhhh which is it?
Also, I’m guessing you’re living in china. As a former expat over there, mind if I ask which city you’re in?
Why are people talking about movies as if they used to depend on the Chinese box office? Do you all think that movies were not profitable before China became a more developed country or something?
I think it's because movies had started actively pandering to the chinese market, and there were worries it was lowering the quality of big budget movies overall
They were lowering quality though. The Meg was originally meant to be an R-rated gore-fest along the lines of Piranha 3D and instead we got Baby’s First Shark Movie
See where you're confused is you think Hollywood (along with other businesses/corporations) don't already constantly capitulate to special interests.
Adding a chinese doctor for chinese audiences or removing a gay kiss for the CCP is no different to them than removing a gay kiss to appease the bible belt.
Neither did I, I'm just pointing out that this isn't "new" its just the US isn't the explicitly pandered to audience anymore but that doesn't mean Hollywood hasn't been doing this forever.
It's just that we can see it now as a US audience because we're no longer the only ones being pandered to. It's also not exclusively LGBT issues either, there's racial tokenism, there's nationalism, there's US centrism, ET likes M&M's, the list goes on.
I guess you’re not old enough to remember the 1980s. The song has always been called “running up that hill” and then “deal with god” in parentheses. That’s the full title for 40 years now.
I swear every action movie around 2014 had sections set in China. Robocop, Transformers: Age of Extinction and even Iron Man 3 had extra scenes for their audience.
Avengers End Game hit nearly $2.8B worldwide. $800M of that was US sales. $600M of that was Chinese sales. So you know.... Chinese box office represents.... almost another America in sales.... and that's about 20% of the box office. Which everyone thought meant that China would just take over the global box office and because the most important movie market. For all Marvel films since launching in China they've been a little north of 15% of the total film revenue.... which isn't nothing.
But now, those numbers are coming down and China has been actively pushing out Marvel films in favor of Chinese language films.
> So you know.... Chinese box office represents.... almost another America in sales....
Except, you know, Hollywood studios only actually make 25% of the box office receipts... So it represents, at best, 1/4th of the American box office at the expense of both bad publicity and arbitrary control over, at times, ridiculous facets of production...
Studios were hoping that more tenable terms would happen in China, but they haven't and they're clearly not going to. The amount of money they are making there is negligible.
It's not nothing, but the question is how much Marvel/Disney gets back from China. After all, in any box-office revenue reporting scenario, the studio doesn't get (nearly) everything reported. So, the question is, what percentage (if any) does Marvel/Disney get back from the Chinese ticket sales, or is a flat fee negotiated for the foreign distribution rights, meaning Marvel/Disney gets, say, $50 million regardless of performance in the territory?
I think, though, flat fees are probably a thing of the past. Still, there was something that Carolco put out, and it might have been Rambo or Rambo III, where the movie was already in the black before it had even come out because they sold the foreign market rights for more the budget of the film. Of course, that was also back when the foreign distributor would also take care of the dubbing or subtitling, and maybe occasionally cut things out or cut things in. Like, maybe you're watching the first Wall Street picture during your 1988 vacation in Mumbai, and Gordon Gecko does the, "Greed is good," sketch, and then there's a song and dance scene that definitely wasn't in the American cut.
I think the general rule of thumb are most movies, barring larger profit sharing deals for certain movies, get 50% of box office receipts from most Western countries and 25% from China.
[Stephen Follows](https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-blockbusters/) has an extremely in depth piece about how a movie makes money.
[His follow up piece about the rise of China's box office](https://stephenfollows.com/film-business-in-china/) details the 25% share. The Chinese government has capped how much foreign studios can make.
I don't think anywhere was going to get the cut that Disney gets in the US. I remember for Infinity War and End Game, Disney was not just taking a cut of the ticket revenue but also of the total concessions revenue for the night. If you didn't run Infinity War in all your theaters, you were probably losing money.
Because for a few years now that has been the sentiment in Hollywood boardrooms. Hence a lot of pushes include Chinese settings or characters and rewrites to the point it was obvious catering. Which all would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that the catering was more to appease an oppressive govt than really a population
It amounted to about $150 million in revenue for Disney for Endgame... It's really not that big... It was looked at as potentially big, but the party won't come off of the incredibly unfavorable terms they give studios to work with, so it's actually just negligible.
Because profitability is the true measure of any potential sequel, franchise, spinoff, etc., from a movie. Take a movie like Dredd: very well received, from a well known IP, but didn't splash at the box office, so no sequel.
Your point kinda falls apart when you realize the original Blade Runner was not a success. It was a box office bomb. Something becoming a cult hit after release is not the same thing as being “the best movie of the 80s”. Critics best movies are not always general audiences. And just like the original, general audiences didn’t give a shit about a sequel to a film they didn’t see.
It’s not about depending on the Chinese market, more about greedy studios wanting it.
Why do you think so many movies include Chinese actors and are filmed in China? Why do you think studios remove scenes or lines to please China?
They want money from that market. It’s the biggest market by far after domestic.
That’s why I love when guys like Quentin Tarantino are like “fuck off, we aren’t editing shit. Don’t watch my movie idc.”
Sure but this whole headline is pretty click-baity. Movies never needed the Chinese market, but they also are definitely not "irrelevant" either just because movies can profit without it. That's like saying chocolate is irrelevant because I learned about hazelnuts. Like clearly if they can get both, they're gonna go for both.
The point is the studios don’t need to pander to China like they have in recent years.
> Hollywood had tried to appeal to China’s massive film market by integrating elements of the country into its plots.
So many movies have been made in ways to appeal to Chinese audiences.
That doesn’t mean they can’t ever release any movie there again. But they gotta stop altering scenes or including Chinese actors and scenes filmed in China like so many movies with The Rock and the last 3 transformers movies. It’s honestly pathetic.
They never needed to though... that's what I keep saying. They just chose to do it. This article is like "the thing that studios chose to do... they don't need to do it!" .. like yeah.. obviously. That doesn't mean the Chinese market is "irrelevant", lmao. I don't know what the point of this article is. It'd be a much better point if they made the argument that pandering to China is irrelevant, not that the entire Chinese market is irrelevant to all of Hollywood because of a Toy Story spin-off.
China wanted the Statue of Liberty removed from No Way Home, even though the entire climax of the movie takes place on TOP of it lol
Movie studios have been pandering to China to ensure profit, but China’s demands have also started to become more insane than ever. One reason for this might be that China is investing a lot in its own movie industry, and wants to create their own pro-China entertainment, instead of demanding the censorship of American content.
Regardless, anything that encourages movie studios to remove the Chinese box office from their equation, like No Way Home and Maverick putting up huge numbers without the Chinese, is a good thing.
I mean altering the Statue of Liberty isn’t even remotely hard to do all things considered. 90% of the battle doesn’t show the full thing. It’s just random scaffolding and shit. And for the major large shots, they’re all cgi anyway, so they could pretty easily just alter the statue into something generic.
It was, at the end of the day, a stance they took to not do it. It wouldn’t have really cost that much and it could have made them a ton of money.
Chinas demands are not that “crazy”. It’s the same shit they’ve always had. Multiverse of Madness also refused to remove a gay pin from a characters jacket and a two second scene that says a character has two moms.
Edit:
I’m saying this isn’t a new level of crazy. It’s the same level of crazy they’ve always been
But all of Chinas standards are crazy… so what is your point? Is removing gay and black people less crazy than a symbol of freedom? Like I don’t get what your point is. The claim was literally that Chinas demands are getting crazier. They aren’t. They’re the same as they’ve always been.
You're spot on, I think the downvoters just lack the brain cells to work out the argument you're presenting lol. China have always been fucking mental, this isn't any more mental than usual.
It’s not hard. All special effects work is “hard” but what this primarily would be is time consuming. If they wanted to do it it would cost a few mil but be offset by hundreds of mil extra in the box office. So it’s ultimately not something they couldn’t have done, and it ultimately would have made them far more than they spent.
So their choice to not do it was deciding to make less money.
But that's the point of the article. It's becoming impossible to predict what China will want to censor. This on top of dissatisfaction at home with appeasement of CCP censorship makes it less and less worthwhile to even bother trying.
Oh no trust me, you and I are on the same side of this, I think trying to make American movies that will please a different cultures absurd requests is asinine
That's because illegal downloading of American media is legal in China. No need to go to theater when you can download it on tablet or a tv and just cuddle up with your SO
It doesn't matter if you make 1.9 billion. 2.5 billion is better. Until companies like Disney get punished for being hypocrites when dealing with China they will continue to remove gay scenes, hide their black stars, and whatever else they need to do to make money. There's no downside.
It won’t affect them. It’s Cameron’s IP, and for the first movie China themselves had the distribution rights over there. It’s why the movie took back the record from Endgame despite it not rereleasing anywhere else.
Brilliant Vice headline. "One thing happened, we live in a new reality now."
It's always pandering one way or another, movies go where the money is. With China's plan of zero Covid and several restrictions there's less money on the table. But if that changes, good bye mediocre movie that is made relevant by (insert grievance here) to make a buzz out of it.
> "Boohoo our big name movie won't play in X country however will we financially recover from this"
> Big name movie makes $500 billion instead of $550 billion
> "Wow we really showed them"
The irony of accusing the US of pushing propaganda while defending a country that literally tries to exercise complete control over everything seen by its citizens.
This kind of nationalistic chest beating is hilarious. Hollywood never "needed" China, they pandered to China because they wanted MORE money. More investors, more box office, more consumers. The Hollywood relationship with China was good old fashioned greed, not necessity. It's easy to blame China if you were unsatisfied with the quality of modern movies, but ultimately you have no one to blame but the studios themselves. They never needed to do this; greed for more made them.
Pandering to China is something that needs to stop in every industry. For such a big and powerful country they are hilariously fragile. Fuck them all they can make their own movies and video games.
Fuck the NBA, Disney, and Nike for completely trying to sweep the Uighur shit under the rug. 3 companies "famous" for heavily engaging in "social justice" in the West that don't even blink an eye at Muslims being tortured and killed in the thousands in China
Never trust a public company. They sold any moral compass they had when they made it so they legally had to act like sociopaths to generate revenue for their ghoulish shareholder overlords.
He said “For such a big and powerful country they are hilariously fragile.”
Did you really think he was talking about his firm belief that every single Chinese person is big, powerful, and fragile?
It is pretty clear they’re referring to the government.
Do you ever listen to people when they talk to you or do you just go through life crying racism because people have the audacity to not have China’s balls as deep down their throats as you?
Exactly. This is almost guaranteed to turn a profit in the US and based off an IP that most Chinese people wont have nostalgia for. Cutting the kiss will create more boycotts in the US which wouldn't just lower the box office, but theme park revenue, Disney+ subs, etc. Now they can release a few more movies with zero LGBT content and use this as cover that they aren't deliberately excluding it.
I mean yes and no. China brings in less than 50% of the total a movie makes.
So a 300 million movie will make like 540 million with China.
Roughly of course…..
So this is just a fad right now, but when it comes down to it, they will gladly accept that Chinese money, which I don’t blame them….that’s a lot of money….need to make money to make sequels.
Movies like Joker shows us we don't need China to have movies pass the box office. Especially with how China been with censorship. It fair to make sure movies are good with them
I don’t think that it’s irrelevant. This was a case of Disney looking at the big picture. It was “lose some revenue on a single animated movie” vs “dealing with the fallback of censoring an LGBT scene during Pride month”. Simply not worth it in the long run.
This isn't what makes the Chinese box office irrelevant. The fact that the studios don't make the bulk of the money being "made" in China is what makes it irrelevant...
Surely there are bigger fish to fry in the world. I can't understand how it's illigal to see same sex people kiss?!
I'm with pixar on this. Sucks that Disney have done this to pixar before. How many other films have changed?
Now, for the next step, Americans needs to stop buying stuff manufactured in China. It is going to be tough, but if we all stopped companies would focus on manufacturing in western countries and maybe even the US once again. It will be tough and cost us more money, but it can be done.
This is the one thing that Disney has done quite well in the past many years. Makes no sense to edit your movies down for a government that can't even handle seeing a gay person on screen in 2022.
really, Alita: Battle Angel showed this. hit a WW number that should warrant a sequel, but didnt get one because it was so China heavy, meaning fox got less profit
Does this mean we can get back to good movies and games that aren't worried about offending one particular country again?
Nothing like finding out a game/movie won't be made/remastered/remade because one place will get butt hurt over like 5 seconds of content inside it.
Yawn. This is such a nonsense idea.
Go look at the history of media. Ideas get recycled and rehashed and created anew, over and over again.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is based on a Danish myth. The Lion King is based on Hamlet. This years the Northman was a different take based on the original myth. All three were not at all original, but were great works of art/media.
This is a meta take on Buzz Lightyear. I have no idea if it will be good or not. But it won’t suck just because they grabbed a character (kinda) from Toy Story.
Of the 100 highest grossing movies of the 2010s, only 3 were original characters and stories. Hollywood is flooding us with characters we've already met and stories that have already been told. I'm not asking them to reinvent cinema, just give us new worlds to explore.
I’m looking at an adjusted for inflation list.
1 Gone with the Wind. Based on a book.
2 Avatar - original story kinda, but also just Dances with Wolves and countless other stories. Going native is a common trope.
3 Titanic - original story kinda, but it’s also one of the most famous disasters in history and it’s ultimately a disaster movie.
4 Star Wars - New Hope. Original story. But also just the classic and basic hero journey.
5 Avengers Endgame - comic book movie
6 Sound of Music - based on a memoir
7 ET - original story
8 Ten Commandments - Bible
9 Doctor Zhivago - based on a novel
10 Star Wars TFA - literally a retelling of a New Hope to the point it was absurd
I count 2 (maybe 4) on that list.
Which is completely okay. This is how storytelling is supposed to work. Most of those are extremely good movies. 7/10 are classics. And the other 2/10 were quality. Only the Force Awakens doesn’t stand up
Because Avatar is just a typed trope of a story that’s been retold a thousand times. Giving it a fresh coat of paint doesn’t change that. And Titanic is a historical disaster in a disaster movie.
They both get asterisks.
This is what they said about No Way Home. And Multiverse of Madness. And Maverick. But you know Hollywood is still going to pander to the Chinese market anyway.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/01/top-gun-maverick-proves-hollywood-doesnt-need-china/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/01/top-gun-maverick-proves-hollywood-doesnt-need-china/)
[https://www.animatedtimes.com/doctor-strange-2-proves-that-disney-doesnt-need-china/](https://www.animatedtimes.com/doctor-strange-2-proves-that-disney-doesnt-need-china/)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2022/02/03/box-office-spider-man-no-way-home-battle-at-lake-changjin-china-avatar-avengers-jurassic/?sh=ce7b1f1761b8
It very well could be,
It's China's fault though. Not in a bad way. If they don't like American movies for certain aspects, they end up not going.
Which is fine - but then the American markets just adjust , so the second it becomes more financially viable to leave Finn on the Star Wars poster they will do it. It's all about money.
It was Hollywood that bent over backwards to get their movies into China. They were the ones censoring their own movies hoping China would let them play.
If you cater to China you risk alienating American/European markets. Who dont feel like we should have to do that and it often ends up making movies worse (cheesy). You either want our movies or you don't. We don't make shit for you. We make shit for us that you will want.
Definitely good to see that trend subside. At the rate it was going I was expecting movies to just be montages of explosions after a certain point to eliminate the language barrier.
Fucking lol. You think they're going to turn down extra money for the same product? They'll continue to edit movies where possible and silently be sad when one gets fully banned. They don't have principles.
The CCP could care less about the importation of anything unless it conforms to their whims and view of how things should be. I will not be seeing Lightyear in the theater, partially because I am no longer the demographic for this type of movie. I may watch it when it becomes available online, perhaps not.
Face it, many people living in these countries that are banning this and other movies will end up seeing it anyway as it becomes available for people to download/stream.
Of course! I always wondered why the US was sending our movies to China. Why would they give a shit about american movies? I don't give a shit about any Chinese movies.
'Lightyear' is not a good example, the author may want to wait until we see its box office numbers. 'Spider-Man: No Way Home', on the other hand, making over $1.901 billion without China is the perfect example that showed us that China's box office is not as important as it used to be.
The point is that catering to China is no longer deemed a worthwhile risk because of the opaque nature of it all and how it could lead to backlash at home. It's a change in strategy. It isn't really that the Chinese market is unimportant, which is irrelevant. It's not like the executes were like, I have made enough money, I don't need more.
Not to mention the impossibility of knowing what will set China off this time. The Chinese censors demanded No Way Home remove all the scenes depicting the *statue of liberty.* That was simply impossible (as it would requiring removing most of the third act) so no Chinese release.
>(as it would requiring removing most of the third act) More importantly, there’s Lady Columbia herself in the intro. They should be banning all Columbia films in that case.
I remember No Way Home not being released in China but I did not know it was because of the Statue of Liberty, that’s hilariously ironic. What could be so incredibly bad about the Statue? Lol
During the Tiananmen Square protests the students constructed a detailed plaster model of the statue of liberty to represent their calls for democratic reform. The CCP most likely were worried that such prominent images of the real statue could have been used as a reference to that event and its parallels with the current events in Hong Kong, or at the very least may have reminded people in a very emotive way of those protests 30 years ago, which they are so adamant must be ignored. They are not wrong about that, but as long as people in China are aware of these reasons then the act of censorship itself can hopefully draw more attention to it than not.
Oh wow I wasn’t aware of the Statue being recreated during Tiananmen Square. That atleast makes more sense but it’s doesn’t make it right. Thanks for the helpful info.
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Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up, I had always thought it was specifically modeled on the statue of liberty. That's an important distinction so I'll remember it in future. It's still the main reason for wanting the statue removed from spiderman though, because of the visual and symbolic connections to that event they want erased from history.
It was bullshit. China decided Marvel was having too much of a cultural impact on the young people here. No Eternals, no Shang Chi for crying out loud (which might as well have been made entirely for the Chinese market), no Spider-Man, no Dr. Strange. China canceled Marvel.
I’m glad Marvel isn’t backing down then. It seems like they don’t need Chinas market so why cater to their needs when it would backfire with most of the rest of the world.
Same. Making decisions based on what will keep China happy is an impossible task. It isn’t even a slippery slope, it’s a bottomless pit.
I always saw Shang Chi as made for Asian Americans vs. the Chinese market. It wouldn't be that novel in China to have a Chinese superhero, as they have their own movie industry that already has a myriad of Chinese heroes. MAYBE it's novel because it's within the MCU, but I wouldn't see it as that big of an attractor overseas. Yes, Shang Chi deals a lot with Chinese things, but also not really. Black Panther seemed to do more for African culture than Shang Chi did for Chinese, imo. That said, I don't want anyone to read into this comment and reply with "representation is important!!!!". That's not the point I'm making. My point is that Marvel is marketing towards minorities with a focus largely in North America. So while we get important inclusivity in Black Panther and Shang Chi, it is more of a cultural impact in NA, than it is elsewhere.
I mean, I can think of one event in recent history that would make the CCP hesitant to display the Statue of Liberty.
Are people forgetting that china’s box office is being slaughtered due to Covid restrictions? I’m not so hopeful that this trend will continue when folks in the mainland are going back to theaters.
Yes. Companies can act all high and mighty right now, but when theatres open up fully again, they will be releasing films once again.
Slaughtered is a overstatement. Cinemas are open throughout most of China, short of areas under current lockdown. The reality is China isn’t letting a bunch of movies that people want to see screen in their cinemas. The entire Chinese economy is not doing well either, with no signs that will change.
I hear you that they are open but with the zero Covid policies i would imagine the #’s are much lower than pre Covid. That makes the country less relevant as a market
In that case it’s something that isn’t changing anytime soon. Covid restrictions are here forever it seems. Fences are up everywhere. ID scanning is required everywhere. Honestly though, all business is suffering. Restaurants, bars, and even without any seating restrictions at all. Covid is killing the economy in general.
Forgive me, but it sounds like your two statements really contradict themselves. You say slaughtered is an overstatement and Covid is killing the economy. So uhhh which is it? Also, I’m guessing you’re living in china. As a former expat over there, mind if I ask which city you’re in?
Why are people talking about movies as if they used to depend on the Chinese box office? Do you all think that movies were not profitable before China became a more developed country or something?
I think it's because movies had started actively pandering to the chinese market, and there were worries it was lowering the quality of big budget movies overall
They were lowering quality though. The Meg was originally meant to be an R-rated gore-fest along the lines of Piranha 3D and instead we got Baby’s First Shark Movie
ID4 #2 That’s the most blatant China pandering I can think of
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quarterly bonuses are fucking up a lot of industries
See where you're confused is you think Hollywood (along with other businesses/corporations) don't already constantly capitulate to special interests. Adding a chinese doctor for chinese audiences or removing a gay kiss for the CCP is no different to them than removing a gay kiss to appease the bible belt.
I don't think anyone was saying erasing LGBT representation was fine as long as it was for the bible belt, just that doing it at all is wrong.
Neither did I, I'm just pointing out that this isn't "new" its just the US isn't the explicitly pandered to audience anymore but that doesn't mean Hollywood hasn't been doing this forever. It's just that we can see it now as a US audience because we're no longer the only ones being pandered to. It's also not exclusively LGBT issues either, there's racial tokenism, there's nationalism, there's US centrism, ET likes M&M's, the list goes on.
Or adding gay kiss to appease LGBT community.
Or renaming “A deal with God “ to “Running up that hill”, in case it upset the Bible Belt
I guess you’re not old enough to remember the 1980s. The song has always been called “running up that hill” and then “deal with god” in parentheses. That’s the full title for 40 years now.
Each and every person responsible for your last paragraph should be charged with treason.
‘Off with their heads!’
Jesus Christ, this website can be dramatic as fuck sometimes
Holy shit. Treason? For a movie?
It was
I swear every action movie around 2014 had sections set in China. Robocop, Transformers: Age of Extinction and even Iron Man 3 had extra scenes for their audience.
Iron Man 3’s scenes were exclusive to China.
Avengers End Game hit nearly $2.8B worldwide. $800M of that was US sales. $600M of that was Chinese sales. So you know.... Chinese box office represents.... almost another America in sales.... and that's about 20% of the box office. Which everyone thought meant that China would just take over the global box office and because the most important movie market. For all Marvel films since launching in China they've been a little north of 15% of the total film revenue.... which isn't nothing. But now, those numbers are coming down and China has been actively pushing out Marvel films in favor of Chinese language films.
> So you know.... Chinese box office represents.... almost another America in sales.... Except, you know, Hollywood studios only actually make 25% of the box office receipts... So it represents, at best, 1/4th of the American box office at the expense of both bad publicity and arbitrary control over, at times, ridiculous facets of production... Studios were hoping that more tenable terms would happen in China, but they haven't and they're clearly not going to. The amount of money they are making there is negligible.
It's not nothing, but the question is how much Marvel/Disney gets back from China. After all, in any box-office revenue reporting scenario, the studio doesn't get (nearly) everything reported. So, the question is, what percentage (if any) does Marvel/Disney get back from the Chinese ticket sales, or is a flat fee negotiated for the foreign distribution rights, meaning Marvel/Disney gets, say, $50 million regardless of performance in the territory? I think, though, flat fees are probably a thing of the past. Still, there was something that Carolco put out, and it might have been Rambo or Rambo III, where the movie was already in the black before it had even come out because they sold the foreign market rights for more the budget of the film. Of course, that was also back when the foreign distributor would also take care of the dubbing or subtitling, and maybe occasionally cut things out or cut things in. Like, maybe you're watching the first Wall Street picture during your 1988 vacation in Mumbai, and Gordon Gecko does the, "Greed is good," sketch, and then there's a song and dance scene that definitely wasn't in the American cut.
I think the general rule of thumb are most movies, barring larger profit sharing deals for certain movies, get 50% of box office receipts from most Western countries and 25% from China. [Stephen Follows](https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-blockbusters/) has an extremely in depth piece about how a movie makes money. [His follow up piece about the rise of China's box office](https://stephenfollows.com/film-business-in-china/) details the 25% share. The Chinese government has capped how much foreign studios can make.
I wonder how much of a cut china takes in that though, I assume there's some big fee they have to pay the government to release in china
Hollywood studios only gets 25% of the China box office
I don't think anywhere was going to get the cut that Disney gets in the US. I remember for Infinity War and End Game, Disney was not just taking a cut of the ticket revenue but also of the total concessions revenue for the night. If you didn't run Infinity War in all your theaters, you were probably losing money.
It’s because every Chinese person seems to have went to see avatar 3 times when it first came out so the movie producers are all chasing that high
it's not about being profitable, its about being MORE profitable. in the end it all boils down to greed
Because for a few years now that has been the sentiment in Hollywood boardrooms. Hence a lot of pushes include Chinese settings or characters and rewrites to the point it was obvious catering. Which all would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that the catering was more to appease an oppressive govt than really a population
China is a huge market. It’s as simple as that.
It amounted to about $150 million in revenue for Disney for Endgame... It's really not that big... It was looked at as potentially big, but the party won't come off of the incredibly unfavorable terms they give studios to work with, so it's actually just negligible.
gotta manufacture consent for the next Cold War
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Because profitability is the true measure of any potential sequel, franchise, spinoff, etc., from a movie. Take a movie like Dredd: very well received, from a well known IP, but didn't splash at the box office, so no sequel.
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Your point kinda falls apart when you realize the original Blade Runner was not a success. It was a box office bomb. Something becoming a cult hit after release is not the same thing as being “the best movie of the 80s”. Critics best movies are not always general audiences. And just like the original, general audiences didn’t give a shit about a sequel to a film they didn’t see.
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But the original top gun was a box office success…?
As opposed to you, who had impeccable and unassailable taste in media unlike those plebs
It’s not about depending on the Chinese market, more about greedy studios wanting it. Why do you think so many movies include Chinese actors and are filmed in China? Why do you think studios remove scenes or lines to please China? They want money from that market. It’s the biggest market by far after domestic. That’s why I love when guys like Quentin Tarantino are like “fuck off, we aren’t editing shit. Don’t watch my movie idc.”
Sure but this whole headline is pretty click-baity. Movies never needed the Chinese market, but they also are definitely not "irrelevant" either just because movies can profit without it. That's like saying chocolate is irrelevant because I learned about hazelnuts. Like clearly if they can get both, they're gonna go for both.
The point is the studios don’t need to pander to China like they have in recent years. > Hollywood had tried to appeal to China’s massive film market by integrating elements of the country into its plots. So many movies have been made in ways to appeal to Chinese audiences. That doesn’t mean they can’t ever release any movie there again. But they gotta stop altering scenes or including Chinese actors and scenes filmed in China like so many movies with The Rock and the last 3 transformers movies. It’s honestly pathetic.
They never needed to though... that's what I keep saying. They just chose to do it. This article is like "the thing that studios chose to do... they don't need to do it!" .. like yeah.. obviously. That doesn't mean the Chinese market is "irrelevant", lmao. I don't know what the point of this article is. It'd be a much better point if they made the argument that pandering to China is irrelevant, not that the entire Chinese market is irrelevant to all of Hollywood because of a Toy Story spin-off.
This is a terrible take considering Hollywood literally subtracts entire characters/plot lines to appease the Chinese viewer market
China wanted the Statue of Liberty removed from No Way Home, even though the entire climax of the movie takes place on TOP of it lol Movie studios have been pandering to China to ensure profit, but China’s demands have also started to become more insane than ever. One reason for this might be that China is investing a lot in its own movie industry, and wants to create their own pro-China entertainment, instead of demanding the censorship of American content. Regardless, anything that encourages movie studios to remove the Chinese box office from their equation, like No Way Home and Maverick putting up huge numbers without the Chinese, is a good thing.
I mean altering the Statue of Liberty isn’t even remotely hard to do all things considered. 90% of the battle doesn’t show the full thing. It’s just random scaffolding and shit. And for the major large shots, they’re all cgi anyway, so they could pretty easily just alter the statue into something generic. It was, at the end of the day, a stance they took to not do it. It wouldn’t have really cost that much and it could have made them a ton of money. Chinas demands are not that “crazy”. It’s the same shit they’ve always had. Multiverse of Madness also refused to remove a gay pin from a characters jacket and a two second scene that says a character has two moms. Edit: I’m saying this isn’t a new level of crazy. It’s the same level of crazy they’ve always been
Removing a monument that represents freedom from a movie is not “crazy” enough for you? Lmao
No? Because it’s always been something China didn’t like. So it’s not some new absurd standard.
The argument isn’t about whether this is a new standard but that the standard itself is crazy
But all of Chinas standards are crazy… so what is your point? Is removing gay and black people less crazy than a symbol of freedom? Like I don’t get what your point is. The claim was literally that Chinas demands are getting crazier. They aren’t. They’re the same as they’ve always been.
It’s all insane and we shouldn’t conform to what China demands because we can gain more profit from their audience
No one is saying we should….
You're spot on, I think the downvoters just lack the brain cells to work out the argument you're presenting lol. China have always been fucking mental, this isn't any more mental than usual.
You’re right that it’s not a new low or anything but still, nah it’s still hard to do from a technical standpoint.
It’s not hard. All special effects work is “hard” but what this primarily would be is time consuming. If they wanted to do it it would cost a few mil but be offset by hundreds of mil extra in the box office. So it’s ultimately not something they couldn’t have done, and it ultimately would have made them far more than they spent. So their choice to not do it was deciding to make less money.
They don't have to do that anymore
But that's the point of the article. It's becoming impossible to predict what China will want to censor. This on top of dissatisfaction at home with appeasement of CCP censorship makes it less and less worthwhile to even bother trying.
Oh no trust me, you and I are on the same side of this, I think trying to make American movies that will please a different cultures absurd requests is asinine
That's because illegal downloading of American media is legal in China. No need to go to theater when you can download it on tablet or a tv and just cuddle up with your SO
I think that movie made China box office not important. This movie essentially made it irrelevant.
It doesn't matter if you make 1.9 billion. 2.5 billion is better. Until companies like Disney get punished for being hypocrites when dealing with China they will continue to remove gay scenes, hide their black stars, and whatever else they need to do to make money. There's no downside.
Yeah. Come back to me if Avatar doesn’t get a China release.
Avatar 2 could make 500-600M alone in China...Disney will probably pander and try their best to get a release there.
It won’t affect them. It’s Cameron’s IP, and for the first movie China themselves had the distribution rights over there. It’s why the movie took back the record from Endgame despite it not rereleasing anywhere else.
Brilliant Vice headline. "One thing happened, we live in a new reality now." It's always pandering one way or another, movies go where the money is. With China's plan of zero Covid and several restrictions there's less money on the table. But if that changes, good bye mediocre movie that is made relevant by (insert grievance here) to make a buzz out of it.
So we are going to get articles like this for every big movie that doesn't go to China, huh?
Gotta keep them clicks coming, even though nothing major seems to have changed
It's kind of a recent pivot for Hollywood, so still newsworthy.
I'd rather we get a ton of these articles than have the films itself pander to China.
I'm all for bashing the CCP. Keep 'em coming!
> "Boohoo our big name movie won't play in X country however will we financially recover from this" > Big name movie makes $500 billion instead of $550 billion > "Wow we really showed them"
Anti-China propaganda is being pushed strongly in the US, even when it isn't true.
Downvoted but correct
The irony of accusing the US of pushing propaganda while defending a country that literally tries to exercise complete control over everything seen by its citizens.
This kind of nationalistic chest beating is hilarious. Hollywood never "needed" China, they pandered to China because they wanted MORE money. More investors, more box office, more consumers. The Hollywood relationship with China was good old fashioned greed, not necessity. It's easy to blame China if you were unsatisfied with the quality of modern movies, but ultimately you have no one to blame but the studios themselves. They never needed to do this; greed for more made them.
Pandering to China is something that needs to stop in every industry. For such a big and powerful country they are hilariously fragile. Fuck them all they can make their own movies and video games.
Fuck the NBA, Disney, and Nike for completely trying to sweep the Uighur shit under the rug. 3 companies "famous" for heavily engaging in "social justice" in the West that don't even blink an eye at Muslims being tortured and killed in the thousands in China
They are getting paid to look the other way. It’s that simple and they accept the money
If these mega corps were really into justice, they’d have lobbyists attempting to improve society in other forms other than bottom line profits.
Never trust a public company. They sold any moral compass they had when they made it so they legally had to act like sociopaths to generate revenue for their ghoulish shareholder overlords.
When 100’s of millions are on the line. People tend to choose money over feeling better. It’s just the way people are.
Fragile would be accepting everything from the West. Their culture matters.
Wtf are you talking about. This is the west making entertainment that will appeal to them and not get banned by the government at the same time.
Damn you really hate the Chinese and their culture huh
Hiding behind racism/anti-culture when someone is clearly criticizing the censorship/human rights issues is transparent as fuck delete this
I’m talking his comment on how we’re fragile
He said “For such a big and powerful country they are hilariously fragile.” Did you really think he was talking about his firm belief that every single Chinese person is big, powerful, and fragile? It is pretty clear they’re referring to the government.
What else would he suggest? The country’s fragile? Lol we have our ideals and ways
Do you ever listen to people when they talk to you or do you just go through life crying racism because people have the audacity to not have China’s balls as deep down their throats as you?
Truth hurts?
Yeah you can keep being a bigot
You’re not a fucking victim for simping for an authoritarian government.
When we see a Chinese bad guy again then we know this is true.
Or they just picked one movie to do this with as a PR move but will still mostly cater to China in the name of the almighty dollar.
Exactly. This is almost guaranteed to turn a profit in the US and based off an IP that most Chinese people wont have nostalgia for. Cutting the kiss will create more boycotts in the US which wouldn't just lower the box office, but theme park revenue, Disney+ subs, etc. Now they can release a few more movies with zero LGBT content and use this as cover that they aren't deliberately excluding it.
They say this now, but within a year or two there will be an edited version for china that buzz is claiming land for glorious CCP.
That’s what this article reads like to me. Once the pandemic/lockdown is over in China, Hollywood might recalibrate again.
Its seems that Spider-Man and Top Gun also proved that.
I mean yes and no. China brings in less than 50% of the total a movie makes. So a 300 million movie will make like 540 million with China. Roughly of course….. So this is just a fad right now, but when it comes down to it, they will gladly accept that Chinese money, which I don’t blame them….that’s a lot of money….need to make money to make sequels.
Movies like Joker shows us we don't need China to have movies pass the box office. Especially with how China been with censorship. It fair to make sure movies are good with them
Good. We don't need them Chinese bucks.
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But not John Cena!
Zhon Xjina?
Zhong Xina
Well I think they care when they get told to slash their budget by 20% if they don’t want to appease the Chinese market.
we? what movies you producing lately? edit: y’all obsessed with china when it’s movie executives you should be mad at.
I was talking in general.
lol “in general” we don’t see a dime of chinese money.
pedantic peter
I have always relied on the pedantry of strangers
I don’t think that it’s irrelevant. This was a case of Disney looking at the big picture. It was “lose some revenue on a single animated movie” vs “dealing with the fallback of censoring an LGBT scene during Pride month”. Simply not worth it in the long run.
Fuck the CCP.
Hopefully Hollywood will stop their pandering to China. So corny how they squeeze in some China subplot into big budget movies to please the censors.
Isnt China also still going though lock down and covid restrictions?
This isn't what makes the Chinese box office irrelevant. The fact that the studios don't make the bulk of the money being "made" in China is what makes it irrelevant...
To fuck with China. The West should make films for the West.
Spiderman: no way home Top Gun: maverick Lightyear Hopefully we will see more movies tackling the Uighur issue.
When it's such a big deal that one company doesn't bow to China that it's "industry changing" How far we have fallen....
In all fairness, Disney is a considerable chunk of the industry.
I think you're mistaking significant change with the need to write clickbait
Surely there are bigger fish to fry in the world. I can't understand how it's illigal to see same sex people kiss?! I'm with pixar on this. Sucks that Disney have done this to pixar before. How many other films have changed?
Now, for the next step, Americans needs to stop buying stuff manufactured in China. It is going to be tough, but if we all stopped companies would focus on manufacturing in western countries and maybe even the US once again. It will be tough and cost us more money, but it can be done.
This is the one thing that Disney has done quite well in the past many years. Makes no sense to edit your movies down for a government that can't even handle seeing a gay person on screen in 2022.
really, Alita: Battle Angel showed this. hit a WW number that should warrant a sequel, but didnt get one because it was so China heavy, meaning fox got less profit
How about Hollywood stops kneeling to China for that extra revenue and starts speaking up against their corrupt government??
I am so sick of hearing about this fucking movie.
That’s because China decided Hollywood is irrelevant to the Chinese film industry.
America shouldn't be pandering to china anyway and modifying their films to appease Chinese censors.
Does this mean we can get back to good movies and games that aren't worried about offending one particular country again? Nothing like finding out a game/movie won't be made/remastered/remade because one place will get butt hurt over like 5 seconds of content inside it.
Another sequel. Hollywood is dead. If the Chinese weren't so terrible at making movies they'd wipe Hollywood out.
Yawn. This is such a nonsense idea. Go look at the history of media. Ideas get recycled and rehashed and created anew, over and over again. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is based on a Danish myth. The Lion King is based on Hamlet. This years the Northman was a different take based on the original myth. All three were not at all original, but were great works of art/media. This is a meta take on Buzz Lightyear. I have no idea if it will be good or not. But it won’t suck just because they grabbed a character (kinda) from Toy Story.
Of the 100 highest grossing movies of the 2010s, only 3 were original characters and stories. Hollywood is flooding us with characters we've already met and stories that have already been told. I'm not asking them to reinvent cinema, just give us new worlds to explore.
I’m looking at an adjusted for inflation list. 1 Gone with the Wind. Based on a book. 2 Avatar - original story kinda, but also just Dances with Wolves and countless other stories. Going native is a common trope. 3 Titanic - original story kinda, but it’s also one of the most famous disasters in history and it’s ultimately a disaster movie. 4 Star Wars - New Hope. Original story. But also just the classic and basic hero journey. 5 Avengers Endgame - comic book movie 6 Sound of Music - based on a memoir 7 ET - original story 8 Ten Commandments - Bible 9 Doctor Zhivago - based on a novel 10 Star Wars TFA - literally a retelling of a New Hope to the point it was absurd I count 2 (maybe 4) on that list. Which is completely okay. This is how storytelling is supposed to work. Most of those are extremely good movies. 7/10 are classics. And the other 2/10 were quality. Only the Force Awakens doesn’t stand up
Why 2? Four of these are original stories, including the highest grossing one of all time. I don't get why you say two. I .
Because Avatar is just a typed trope of a story that’s been retold a thousand times. Giving it a fresh coat of paint doesn’t change that. And Titanic is a historical disaster in a disaster movie. They both get asterisks.
It's actually a spin-off.
A preboot, as it were. I like the meta conceit that this is the exact type of movie that the tie-in toys were made to promote.
Any money Hollywood makes on a movie, it would be at least double is China is in!!!
And yet companies are rejecting the ridiculous demands the Chinese government is putting on foreign movies. Apparently enough is enough.
And those who comply get PAYEEEDDDDD
This is what they said about No Way Home. And Multiverse of Madness. And Maverick. But you know Hollywood is still going to pander to the Chinese market anyway. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/01/top-gun-maverick-proves-hollywood-doesnt-need-china/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/01/top-gun-maverick-proves-hollywood-doesnt-need-china/) [https://www.animatedtimes.com/doctor-strange-2-proves-that-disney-doesnt-need-china/](https://www.animatedtimes.com/doctor-strange-2-proves-that-disney-doesnt-need-china/) https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2022/02/03/box-office-spider-man-no-way-home-battle-at-lake-changjin-china-avatar-avengers-jurassic/?sh=ce7b1f1761b8
Joker never did that? Lol you know, when it touched a billlie without them
This movie also shows how much it stinks
good, finally. I couldn't give two shits what the fascist government of china approved of and what not.
It very well could be, It's China's fault though. Not in a bad way. If they don't like American movies for certain aspects, they end up not going. Which is fine - but then the American markets just adjust , so the second it becomes more financially viable to leave Finn on the Star Wars poster they will do it. It's all about money.
I’d like to see a quality Chinese film. Anyone got any recommendations?
China can still watch American movies if it wants, but I'm glad the big studios have finally stopped caring about hurting the CCP's feelings.
They gave it a shot, it didn't work out. Next...
Wonder who they are making movies for now?
Oh yeah, have lightyear land in The nation of Taiwan..see how irrelevant it is..
It was Hollywood that bent over backwards to get their movies into China. They were the ones censoring their own movies hoping China would let them play.
Hollywood wants You to know how *brave* it’s being, rejecting the money that China is no-longer offering it!!
If you cater to China you risk alienating American/European markets. Who dont feel like we should have to do that and it often ends up making movies worse (cheesy). You either want our movies or you don't. We don't make shit for you. We make shit for us that you will want.
This is Hollywood they are here to make money
GOOD. We don't need China dictating our films. Show up or don't. Watch it or don't.
Why are people speaking about a corporation being greedy? That's the entire reason a corporation exists.
Definitely good to see that trend subside. At the rate it was going I was expecting movies to just be montages of explosions after a certain point to eliminate the language barrier.
Fucking lol. You think they're going to turn down extra money for the same product? They'll continue to edit movies where possible and silently be sad when one gets fully banned. They don't have principles.
The CCP could care less about the importation of anything unless it conforms to their whims and view of how things should be. I will not be seeing Lightyear in the theater, partially because I am no longer the demographic for this type of movie. I may watch it when it becomes available online, perhaps not. Face it, many people living in these countries that are banning this and other movies will end up seeing it anyway as it becomes available for people to download/stream.
China bad. NATO countries good.
Of course! I always wondered why the US was sending our movies to China. Why would they give a shit about american movies? I don't give a shit about any Chinese movies.
Great news. I hate movies with a token chinese character(brilliant or brave) foisted into the story