In a May 19 article, The Hollywood Reporter, one of the industry’s two leading magazines, reflected for the first time on the unequal cooperation between Hollywood studios and China and the evolution of their relationship from excitement to disillusionment. The article quotes analysts as saying that the cash flow between Hollywood and Beijing has stopped, censorship is increasing and human rights abuses in China’s “central kingdom” have become a minefield for Hollywood. Observers say the fact that an authoritative Hollywood publication is addressing this long-standing taboo subject is itself a rule change.
Clarifying the complex tangle between Ting Zhao, Disney and China
The 6,000-word article, which appeared in the May 19 paper edition of The Hollywood Reporter and was published electronically on its website on May 21, is titled “From Bustle to Decoupling: Is the Chinese Hollywood Romance Officially Over? Using Zhao Ting and her film “Land of the Unwanted” and its historic Academy Award achievement as a starting point, the article describes how Disney “has been careful to avoid stepping on possible minefields when it comes to China” as Zhao Ting directed Disney’s Zhao’s home country is China, and China is Disney’s “most important overseas market,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, an executive at Disney’s Searchlight Studios stressed in a March 4 email to Hollywood media that when reporting on “Land of the Uninhabited,” it was important to note that Zhao Ting is a Chinese director and that she is a Chinese national, or a Chinese citizen. . In addition, in late 2020, the company’s publicist convinced a small media outlet to remove Zhao Ting’s 2013 comment that “China is full of lies. Still, Zhao Ting’s comment was dredged up by China, and later came the well-known Chinese blockade of Zhao Ting, Land of the Uninhabited, and the Oscars.
One user trolled, “A Chinese director, who made an insulting movie in the U.S., won an Oscar, only to be blocked by China.”
The Hollywood article says that Disney’s biggest concern at the moment is whether Zhao Ting’s Disney blockbuster, the $200 million budgeted “The Eternal One,” will be released in China as hoped, and that prospect now looks bleak; not long ago, when CCTV’s Channel 6 movie channel previewed the release date of the U.S. movie, there was no mention of “The Eternal One” or Marvel Studios’ “The Legend of Shang Qi and the Ten Commandments.
The article quotes former Warner Bros. executive Jeff Robinov as saying, “For decades, [China] has been promising cooperation to Western companies that want to participate in all areas of the Chinese economy; however, for investors, they have never seen any form of such cooperation. seen any kind of security guarantee for that cooperation.”
Producer Chris Fenton, author of “Feeding the Red Dragon,” a book detailing how Hollywood is “working unequally” with Beijing, told VOA: “I gave a lot of information to one of the authors of this article, Tatiana Siegel. The fact that Hollywood’s leading industry magazine is speaking out about the long-held taboo of not working with China is a game-changer in itself. I sincerely expect that this will lead to a disruptive, but also constructive, change in the way the entertainment industry interacts with China.”
Fenton told The Hollywood Reporter, “Disney should have the ability to say, ‘We, as a company, don’t approve of what’s happening in Xinjiang,’ …… and they should be able to make that statement without fear that the lights at the Shanghai theme park will have its lights turned off.”
However, The Hollywood Reporter says it’s not at all clear how this Fenton ideal will be achieved in the relentlessly powerful industry of global entertainment.
Says Chinese magic wand once enchanted Hollywood
Robinov’s comments about the “insecurity” of the Western industry breaking into China are heartfelt. He himself founded Studio 8 in 2014 because China’s “Fosun Group” promised to invest $1 billion; after the sudden trade war, Fosun couldn’t keep its promise and bailed, but still holds the key today. “The company still holds a stake in Studio 8.
In 2012, former Disney board chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg joined forces with the Chinese government’s state-owned China Media Capital and Shanghai Media Group to create “Oriental Dream Factory”. This Shanghai-based dream factory promises to produce animated films for the world in both English and Chinese.
China’s largest private film company, Huayi Brothers, is investing in the first 18 films of STX Entertainment, a new company established in 2014.
In 2016, Adam Goodman, the former president of Paramount Pictures, joined China’s LeTV Entertainment and thus became president of a new international production company that will reportedly produce English-language feature films using Chinese capital.
In the same year, directors Joe and Anthony Russell, brothers who rose to the top of their careers making Marvel films, have been appearing in Beijing almost every month, shuttling to meetings in the Chinese entertainment industry in anticipation of setting up a Chinese studio and producing Chinese language films.
According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter, none of the above Hollywood studios looking to get a piece of the China pie have survived to this day. “Oriental DreamWorks is already a fully Chinese-owned company, with the same Chinese name, but in English as Pearl Studio, in Shanghai’s Xuhui District.
“STX Entertainment was scheduled to go public in Hong Kong, but the plan didn’t work out and it had to accept a merger with an Indian Bollywood studio.
“LETV Entertainment closed down because it didn’t get the money promised by the Chinese side.
“Studio 8 is looking for a new investor.
The Russell Brothers directors are no longer in Beijing, but are focusing on their own American production company, although they did get a little seed money from Huayi Brothers.
Criticism of Hollywood’s silence bought by money
The Hollywood Reporter article points out that in the more than a decade since China rose to become a potential global powerhouse, with its commercial interests and political influence extending to every corner of the world, Hollywood studios have never produced a single production, large or small, that has been critical of China or responsive to Chinese reality.
The article points out that even the most outspoken Hollywood celebrities have consistently failed to mention such phenomena as Beijing’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the forced detention of a million Chinese minority Muslims in Xinjiang.
One exception is Judd Apatow, the award-winning director, producer and playwright. In an interview with “Microsoft NBC” last September, he said, “Rather than making China freer by doing business with them, China has bought our silence with their money.”
In general, the report said, studios seem to have calculated that they would lose badly if they crossed the red line and commented publicly on these matters, “basically they would risk losing all their business in China in a heartbeat – as much as China can give, it can also take away. MLB has learned that lesson the hard way. After Houston Rockets GM Andy Murray tweeted a few words in support of Hong Kong, MLB games were banned from China for an entire year.”
The article also refers to the “explosive report” released by PEN America last year – “Made in Hollywood, Censored in Beijing” – which detailed how major Hollywood studios and The article also refers to an “explosive report” published by PEN America last year – “Made in Hollywood, Censored in Beijing” – which detailed how major Hollywood studios and front-line directors “changed plots, lines and locations to avoid confrontation with Chinese officials.
How China is “Baiting the Enemy Deeper” and Taking the Initiative
Beijing, on the other hand, uses its standard manual to play catch-up in a mature industry dominated by Westerners: quickly and modestly opening the doors of the local market and attracting experienced foreign companies to collaborate and form joint ventures (a condition for market access in the West), with the ultimate goal of facilitating rapid knowledge transfer to the Chinese side while limiting the potential dominance of foreign companies, the article says. “American films are culturally influential in a way that the CCP does not want, but they recognize the magic of Hollywood films to attract consumers and use it strategically to promote China’s domestic infrastructure.”
Indeed, a historic movie theater expansion boom followed. The number of movie screens in China has increased from more than 6,000 in 2010 to 75,000 by the end of 2020.
Chinese official media Xinhua reported in 2019 that by the end of that year, “the country’s total number of screens reached 69,787;” by the end of 2016, that number exceeded 40,000, “surpassing the United States and becoming the world’s No. 1.”
At the same time, trade barriers, harsh split terms and ongoing piracy problems for Chinese films have plagued U.S. studios. Moreover, Chinese regulations do not allow U.S. studios to directly determine the release, promotion and distribution dates of their films in China, forcing them instead to distribute through government distributors, the “China Film Group” or “Huaxia Film Distribution Ltd.”, two distribution These two distribution channels will take a huge slice of the profit pie.
On the other hand, Beijing has encouraged Chinese private companies to carry the national flag overseas and learn from the experience of successful foreign competitors by making multinational investments and acquisitions.
Since the 2010s, Chinese capital has rained down on Hollywood, including blockbuster investments such as Bona Film’s $235 million for Twentieth Century Fox and Perfect World’s $500 million for Universal Pictures. The company has invested $500 million in Universal Pictures.
Jack Ma’s Alibaba also bought a part of director Spielberg’s Amberlin Entertainment; Tencent subscribed to part of Skydance; Chinese Culture invested in Imagine Entertainment and Imagine Entertainment. “Chinese Culture invested in Imagine Entertainment and Creative Talent Agency. These large investments and subscriptions have not been seen since the Japanese landed in Hollywood in the 1980s.
In 2012, Chinese real estate giant Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group acquired AMC Cinemas, the largest theater in North America, for $2.6 billion.
In January 2016, Wanda announced that it had acquired Legendary Entertainment, based in Burbank, Los Angeles, for $3.5 billion. In the same year, Wanda intends to acquire live TV producer Dick Clark Productions for a whopping $1 billion, will spend $1.2 billion on its U.S. headquarters and real estate development in Beverly Hills, has committed billions of dollars in additional investments throughout the U.S. entertainment industry, and will spend $8 billion to build the world’s largest studio in Qingdao. largest production studio in the world.
It was Wanda’s stunning gesture that alarmed the U.S. Congress, the article said, and in December 2016, Democratic Senator Shulman sent a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department calling for greater regulation of Chinese acquisitions of U.S. media companies “because of the role the industry plays in defending free speech and culture in the United States.”
Also in late 2016, Beijing slammed on the brakes on a frenzy of Chinese companies buying overseas brand assets. In March 2018, Beijing tightened its grip on the media and film industries, bringing them under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party’s propaganda ministry and sparking an outcry.
Now, the article says, Wanda has sold all of its overseas entertainment assets for which it could find buyers, freeing up tens of billions of dollars in assets to avoid a meltdown, and it is seeking to take Legendary Entertainment Corp. public through a special M&A firm. This would allow Wanda to exit the last of its Hollywood holdings.
On Sunday, May 23, 2021, Wanda Group’s website posted a notice stating that “Wanda Group will gradually exit its controlling interest in AMC beginning in 2018. As of May 2021, Wanda Group has fully withdrawn from the board of directors of AMC Corporation, retaining only a minority stake in AMC Corporation and recovering a total of $1.476 billion.”
Hollywood Chinese-American producer Warsaw Yang told Voice of America that she continues to work on her own projects despite the sour and sweet tastes of the big Hollywood studios in their battles with Beijing in the face of poor U.S.-China relations.
Young said she is working on the film “The Year of the Iron Horse,” which is expected to start shooting in three months, reflecting the conditions of Chinese workers in the United States 100 years ago.
Young Warsaw said, “The film tells the story of the Chinese in the U.S. However, the time period is not today, it will not touch the political or diplomatic red lines of today’s reality, and it is not difficult to grasp in terms of sensitivity.”
The Hollywood Reporter article concludes by quoting analysts who say, “We live in times of surprises, but in terms of a visible future, we can see many paths to a deteriorating U.S.-China relationship and few to a turnaround.”
(This article is based on the Hollywood Reporter article, “From Buying and Selling Frenzy to Decoupling: Is China’s Hollywood Romance Officially Over”; written by Patrick Brzezecki and Tatiana Siegel).
Recent Comments