The Indicator from Planet Money - The story of China and Hollywood's big-screen romance

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

No country can come close to the amount of money Americans spend at the box office each year ... that is, until China came along. The US and Chinese film industries have a long intertwined history, with shifting power dynamics. Today on the show, we continue our week-long look at the movie business as we explore the on-and-off romance between Hollywood and China's film industries. Related episodes:Why aren't filmmakers shooting in LA? (Apple / Spotify)Before La La Land there was Fort Lee, New Jersey (Apple / Spotify)For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. Americans love their movies. Historically, no country can even approach the amount Americans spend at the box office each year. That is until China came along. The U.S. and Chinese film industries

actually have a long intertwined history. Today on the show, we continue our week-long look at the movie biz with a tale that melds art, commerce, and geopolitics. A three-act saga about the symbiotic and at times tumultuous relationship between Hollywood and China. Act 1, China goes to the movies. The romance between Hollywood and China begins way back in the early 1900s, the silent movie era. The foundation of early Chinese film industry was actually built by emulating the American style studio model. That's Ying Zhu, a professor at Columbia University, and author of the book, Hollywood,

in China. Although movies were being made in Shanghai, Ying says audiences were most drawn to the American imports, which tended to be flashier and more sophisticated. But this early romance with Hollywood came to an abrupt end in 1950. That's the year after Mao Zedong's Communist Party came into power in China. A massive campaign was launched to discredit Hollywood films, and watching American films was then deemed unpatriotic. The government took over the movie industry, and for decades, the only films being made were ones that served the Communist Party's interests. In response to Chairman Mao's call, millions of Chinese young people are going to the countryside to receive re-education from the workers and peasants. Not exactly popcorn entertainment.

Eventually, though, the Mao era came to an end, and in the 1980s, China was opening up to the world. Its movie industry, though, had basically withered under government control. So the policymakers look around, they decided that we had to really build up the Chinese film market. And what do they do? They went to Hollywood. Act two, reunited. In the early 1990s, China was going through major economic reforms. It was expanding trade with the U.S. and other countries. And one part of that trade relationship was movies.

Eric Schwartzel covers the film industry for the Wall Street Journal and wrote about this period in his book, Red Carpet. The first movie that was kind of formally accepted into Chinese theaters was The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford. I'm not going to turn myself in. I need help, I need money. Richard is innocent. You'll never find him. The fugitive was a hit.

Though at first, Eric says, these Hollywood flicks trickling into China didn't make much money. That would soon change, though, as millions of people, moved from rural areas of China into the cities, and the country's growing middle class developed an appetite for big screen entertainment. And by the 2000s, Hollywood saw their revenue from China soar. You're seeing 20, 30, 40 percent year-over-year growth

in how much money the Chinese box office is pulling in. Very important to point out that at the same time, in the U.S., box office is flatlining, and DVD sales are crows. cratering. And so suddenly, if you're running a Hollywood studio around 2009, you have one column of revenue disappearing and another one appearing out of nowhere. So if you can add $100, $300,000, $300 million to the global gross by getting it into China, you absolutely will. But there were considerations large and small that had to be made to make sure that they could get into the Chinese market.

Yeah, one big consideration? Films had to make it past government sense. Anything that might have been seen as politically problematic or a little too R-rated or maybe even two PG-13 rated would be cut from the film before it would be shown in theaters. And in some cases, studios bent over backwards to appeal to Chinese moviegoers. Eric says one of the best examples is Transformers, Age of Extinction, which was released in 2014. Mark Wahlberg uses Chinese protein powder at one point. He goes to an ATM in the middle of Texas, and it's a Chinese. bank. The entire third act of the film takes place in Hong Kong and when the giant robots are destroying the city. The Chinese fighter jets arrive before the Americans to save the day.

Now, did studios get criticized for bowing to government censorship and pandering to Chinese audiences? Sure. But what did they care? They were raking in the RMBs, baby. Hollywood block Busters put butts in the seats of Chinese multiplexes. It helped resuscitate China's movie industry, and it also made bank for American studios. It seemed at the time like it would be that way forever. Act three, the decoupling. An early sign the romance between Hollywood and China might not be forever came in 2008. That year, DreamWorks released an animated film called Kung Fu Panda.

whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend. And the authorities in China saw it, and they actually grew quite concerned, because here they saw basically their national mascot and some of their cultural heritage being used by a Hollywood studio to create a blockbuster. And they actually convened political summits to discuss Kung Fu Panda

and ask the question, why didn't we make this ourselves? And so they put into legislation that the government would increase support for China's homegrown animation industry. This was just one of many government policies that helped propel China's movie industry into a new phase. And why not? The geopolitical respect, the soft power potential of a global hit, was obvious. So the government offered tax breaks to film production companies. It encouraged co-productions between American and Chinese studios. Chinese officials even made trips to love.

Los Angeles to learn the economics of the movie business from American Studio execs. During these years, China's film industry blossomed. And one person with a front row seat to it all was Dian Ng. I'd say around 2015-ish. You could almost throw anything, okay? Anything in the theaters and it would make, you know, over 100-m-R-N-B at the box office. Dion was born in Taiwan, but grew up in the U.S. And around 1995, he moved to China to study at the Beijing Film Academy.

me. When he graduated, he thought about returning to the U.S., but then... I got a phone call from someone who had seen my student short film, and they're like, hey, do you direct TV commercials? And I'm like, yes, I do. I will now. Dian stayed in China, building up his film credits. And by the 2000s, he made the move into feature films, directing dramas and comedies. Over the years, he says he's seen Chinese audiences' tastes evolve and says eventually they got kind of. on a board with the same old American superhero flicks. And at the same time, you also have domestic films getting better budgets, and they're

starting to tell stories that are more interesting to local audiences. As a result, Hollywood's revenue from Chinese box offices began a years-long slide. And it's got to the point where U.S. studios considering whether to greenlight a new movie will basically assume that they'll make zero money there. Meanwhile, China has made its own blockbusters. A recent prime example is Nejah 2. This animated movie, based on a Chinese folk tale, that hit theaters in January. So far, it's brought in over $2 billion, making it the highest grossing animated film ever.

And that's even before you account for the fact that an English-language version is going to be released in the U.S. later this year. Yet more evidence that Hollywood and China have not exactly divorced, but certainly have decoucels. coupled. And China just doesn't need U.S. films as much as it used to. And all this, of course, is not helped by the geopolitics of it all. After President Trump launched a trade war with China this year, one of the ways China retaliated was by further restricting the import of U.S. films. For Dion, it's all a bit of a bummer because he says a lot of this stuff just does not matter to filmmakers or audiences. I'm optimistic in the sense that I feel like the theatrical experience will always be needed.

Or to put it another way, the multi-part saga that is Hollywood and China may have had its twists and turns, but it's not over yet. Tomorrow in our movie series, Cosplay. We explore the symbiotic relationship between movie studios and their costumes super fans.

This episode of The Indicator was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Debbie Daughtry and Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, taken Canon as our editor, and The Indicators are production of NPR. are.