The Rest Is Entertainment - The Crazy Rise & Fall Of Cameo

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Cameo was a runaway business success during the world's lockdown but it has cut staff and is struggling to even pay small fines. What has happened to the celebrity video service? Have you heard of Fast TV? Richard and Marina take us through the new channels competing with some of the biggest names in streaming. Finally on this episode we turn to video gaming, Black Myth: Wukong has flown in at the top of the charts. It is a first AAA game from a Chinese developer but it has come with some controversy and also tells us a bigger story of entertainment within China and how Hollywood is courting Chinese audiences. Recommendations: Marina: 39 Steps (Trafalgar Theatre) Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie  It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Redeem data in 1GB increments. Save by mixing to lower cost plan and supplementing with rolled data. Downgrades effective following month. Full terms at Sky.com/mobile. Fastest growing 2021 to 2023. Verify at sky.com/mobileclaims. For more information about how you can use Snapchat Family Centre to help your teenagers stay safe online visit https://parents.snapchat.com/en-GB/parental-controls Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restors Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond. Marina, where are you at the moment? I'm in Ibiza which means we're parted and it makes me very sad. Tell me about your trip. Where are you? I am in Edinburgh for the festival being hosted by our lovely friends at Monkey Barrel Comedy and their podcast studio. So I've got lots of flyers behind me. Well, I remember when we used to pass out flyers when I was doing shows in Edinburgh. Well, we had to try and come up with something that makes people take your flyer. And we used to always just say, take a flyer, passerbyer. Oh, that's good. They would always involuntarily laugh and think, oh, fine, I'll have one more of these

things. I've been at the Edinburgh Fringe for the last 35 years and I've not taken a single flyer in all that time. Take a flyer, passerbyer. Okay, I will. Actually, I will. What are we talking about this week? Right, we're going to talk about Cameo, the celebrity messaging app which

has hit the skids. It might be the most 21st century story of all time, the story of Cameo. What else are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about Tubi and fast, free and supported television channels which are just the biggest runaway success, another 21st century story perhaps. Yeah, exactly. And existential threat to Netflix. And we're also talking about the entertainment industry and China, and video games and films and what happens in China, what happens outside of China, all that kind of stuff. Shall we begin then on Cameo? Yes, shall we?

Now, this was started in 2016 by three guys. And if you haven't sampled Cameo, celebrities have to sign up or sub liberties, as I would say, I think if you're, as long as you've got 20,000. How dare you? I've been on it for seven years. You can get a personalized video message from a celebrity. It's one of those businesses that really took off in the pandemic and was It's one of those businesses that really took off in the pandemic and was randomly valued as a billion dollars,

making it a unicorn, as they call it, a tech startup that suddenly becomes a billion dollar company. And this is the biggest why. You'll have to explain to me why this. It has now hit the skids really quite badly. They were recently fined for a sort of endorsement advertising thing in the US, and they were given a $600,000 fine. They were unable to pay the $600,000, which if you're a billion dollar company, you probably should be able to find down the back of one of your fun breakout area sofas. One of your non-fungible sofas.

One of your non-fungible sofas. They could only pay $100,000, and that had to be split between 30 states. So they had 400 staff in 2020. I think they've now got 33. What's gone wrong, Richard? It is an amazing story. I think, as you say, a lot of us sort of became familiar with it, maybe roundabout lockdown, when we realized we could get John Virgo to record a birthday message for our uncle, which is a great service, I would say. Set up by three guys, the two main guys, Stephen Galanis and Martin Blenko. Martin Blenko was an NFL agent and Stephen Galanis worked for LinkedIn. Martin Blenko got one of his clients, Cassius March, to just record a video. He was an NFL player.

I don't know. Are they quarterbacks and things in that game? They are. He recorded a message for a friend who just had a baby and Stephen Galanis saw just how unbelievably thrilled his friend was at getting this and the two of them put their heads together and set up Cameo. And it's one of those things they essentially found as many sports people as they could, as many reality stars, as many actors, signed them up, put them on this website. You pay £30, £40, £50 depending on whoever it is. You can get

anyone to send a personalised message to your mum, to your friends, to your WhatsApp group. You know, a million different ways to do it. They will say anything you like within reason. And it sort of took off because everyone wants a personalised birthday greeting from, you know, Kevin from the office. And Kevin from the office wants to make $40 a pop to record it. I think they sort of want it for five minutes and they definitely want it in the pandemic when there isn't so much human connection. It feels to me like such a pandemic success story that then you're like, hang on, what was all that about? Well the reason it worked in the pandemic is this, it's not that everyone

was bored and thought, I need to get messages from people. It's that everyone in the entertainment business was not working. And everyone's source of income had gone. So lots of celebrities signed up because the key problem that Cameo has always had, as you said before, sub-lebrities and D-listers and things like this was always the image of the thing. And they needed other people to sign up. They needed bigger celebrities. They needed the likes of Floyd Mayweather who eventually signed up to do it.

And during the pandemic, people did because there were no other sources of income. Also during the screen act to strike last year, that was the only time its popularity sort of came back because again, as you say, people's income streams had dried up. Exactly that. So what you had was this company, Cameo, which had a very, very visual product,

which whoever you are, wherever you work, whatever investor you are, you could be sent a message from Caitlyn Jenner and you go, wow, this company is amazing. Who is this company? So people started looking into Cameo and thinking this feels like a big deal This feels like a company that could grow and we often talk about the the era of low interest rates and the awful abominations that came out of that and cameo is one of them because they suddenly found it incredibly easy to raise money because You know this this is the secret of the last

Decade or so is idiots became billionaires because you could just borrow as much money as you want. Money was absolutely free and people who knew that were able to take advantage of it. So Cameo had several funding rounds and as you say, by 2021 were valued at a billion dollars. Now, Steven Galanis who runs this, let's say he's not short of ambition and that's good, that's to be applauded I would say, but let's also remember that a lot of this company is based off just people asking John Virgo to wish their uncle happy birthday, okay?

That's the goal in this morning. You're treating a celebrity as a sort of meat puppet, aren't you? You're basically making them, you're giving them the message. You don't sort of say, well by all means, you know, say your own thing. And as a result, that has been quite a liability for celebrities. By the way, I have to mention him because we've just seen how much he makes for Cameo a year. Nigel Farage constantly records Cameos.

I can't remember what you, last time I looked, he was listed at 70 pounds. I don't know what he's listed that currently, but for a message. And he says he works on it for 24 hours a month. Even through the election, he just sat there recording them. But he has done things. People have tricked him into saying pro-IRA statements. People just make him say sort of ridiculous things. But he honestly, as you know, he literally doesn't care.

Well, I said something slightly off color. Oh dear. So he doesn't mind. To be fair, he's going, do you know what? I've been paid a lot more to say a lot less. Yeah. Yes. But the trouble is that bigger celebrities, I did actually see for a while, Brian Cox was listed and he was $689, I think, for a message.

Brian Cox from Succession, sorry. So I'm sure he could tell you to F off or whatever in the style of Logan Roy. But even he clearly thought, well, this isn't a bad way to make extra money, has removed himself from it. Because I think a lot of people's representation said to them, don't do this. You don't know what you're saying. Half these people just aren't, you know, they'll just read out anything, I'm sorry to say. See, here's the problem is it's a really beautiful business actually that works for everybody.

The guys who set it up, they spotted a gap in the market. That gap in the market was definitely there. People wanted what they did. Celebrities wanted to do it. So someone like Brian Baumgartner, who is Kevin in the office, he was making a million dollars a year from doing cameos because he would charge $70 a pop and he would do so many of them. James Buckley, Jay from The Inbetweeners, he would do 37 cameos a day, a day,

and he made a million dollars from cameo as well. And that to me is a lovely business, because who's being harmed? Golanus actually said, look, this really, really, really works for celebs who are more famous than they are rich. And there are plenty of those. It's no

surprise that Brian Baumgartner and James Buckley are both in ensemble comedies. So they're not making as much as Jerry Seinfeld from their comedy, but they are unbelievably famous. So that's the absolute sweet spot. So you've actually got a really nice business there. But what happens is what always happens in these stories. You start to grow, people start investing in you, and then they need you to grow more and more and more and more. Right? So there's two things happen. Firstly, they give you a load of money, and Martin Galanis is very good at spending money. So again, this website, which I'm going to keep harking back,

is John Virgo saying happy birthday to your uncle. They suddenly had a big festival called Cameo Palooza in 2021. Kenny G. I can just imagine their offices. Can you imagine? Paula Abdul played, Vanilla Ice played. Stephen Galanis said his plan is to build one of the most important beloved consumer companies of the generation as enduring as what Walt Disney did for the last century. Wow, he's not held back by self-doubt, is he? I don't think he is. Here's a guy who does not have imposter syndrome, I would say.

They rented their own cameo house in Hollywood, which is $60,000 a month. They were getting through $5 million a month. They were spending huge amounts of money. Golanus, of course, got into, what do you think he got into? Crypto art. Yeah, of course, it's exactly what he did. He spent hundreds of thousands on little monkey pieces of art that hackers then stole from him. So essentially, John Vogue wishing you a happy birthday, Galinus thinks, no, actually I am. I'm Walt Disney. And you think you're not. You've got a really nice business here that could keep you and

your friends. You honestly, this would just see you through for the next 30 years with lovely money, but everyone wants to be Elon Musk. Everyone wants to be Mark Zuckerberg. You know, everyone wants to be a billionaire and that's what happened to this company. So their current predicament came about really because cameo is still there. You can still go on there and get Wolfram Gladiators to toast your new baby. But given they needed to have growth, growth, growth, growth, they started doing things

like they launched an ad arm where celebrities would endorse your products. And you can sort of see the point of that because advertisers will pay an awful lot more than I would pay for my uncle. But they didn't really label these things as adverts quite as much as they should have done. So they got all sorts of regulatory trouble. Well, that's where their $600,000 fine came from that they couldn't pay. Exactly that. And the fact that interest rates then went up, I mean, the story of every single media conglomerate. Yeah. I quite like their idea of rolling it out to kids. I thought that like getting a

birthday message, that was a really good sort of, you know, I mean, the two messages from gladiators that you have got my daughter, Richard, have been watched about a billion times. So something like that means a huge amount to children. I thought that was a sort of good idea. But in general, it is a small and weird and gimmicky business. Now, one thing I think is quite an interesting one to contrast it with, it's a similar thing. It does provide a connection, if we can call it, we can euphemize it as that.

Something like OnlyFans, which also was a huge pandemic kind of success story. And that's mainly adult content creators, although they do now have musicians and fitness people and comedians and what have you. Again, you can subscribe and you pay to have social media style distribution of often adult content, but sometimes there's plenty of others as well. That is a hugely successful business and that has gone the opposite way. They have 220 million registered users. They got to a hundred million faster than Facebook did. They have three million content creators. That is the trouble you see. There weren't that many celebrities on Cameo.

It was too risky for the big ones. As you say, there was a sweet spot, but in terms of that scalable thing, which we always have to talk about, if you want to go really big, you need to have so many different creators as they're called. And that's what something I OnlyFans has done and has been incredibly successful. Because the creators have a lot more control over their own output there. On Cameo, you've got zero control, other than saying, I don't want to do that video, but OnlyFans, you can curate it. Yes, OnlyFans you can create. And they've gone in completely opposite directions. And you can curate it. Yes, only fans you can create and they've gone in completely opposite directions

and you can see in lots of ways that they had similarities to them but one has become a mega business and one is going to fold. Yeah, it's like a beautiful folly and you know it is, I can't wait for the definitive book that someone writes about cameo and the excess behind it. It's sort of summed up by when they were really absolutely awash with money and everyone thought this was the greatest idea anyone had ever had. They had a promotional idea which is called One Giant Leap for Fankind, which was one lucky cameo viewer and one cameo celebrity were going to be sent into space. That was going to be their competition prize. And this is, you just think, yeah, I absolutely get it.

You can get someone from Heidi Heiter, you know, wish a happy retirement for your boss. But to turn that via the medium of low interest rates into we are sending two people into space is the most 21st century story possible, I would say. I've got a huge amount of time for it. It's such fun. The Russians went on cameo, got a series of people. They got Mike Tyson, Sean Astin, they got Dean Norris from Breaking Bad. They got them to send a message of support to a friend of theirs who was suffering

from substance abuse issues. They then edited together as if these celebrities were sending a message to Vladimir Zelenskyy to encourage the rumour that he had substance abuse problems, so they created a fake video. So all of this stuff was going on. Data actors making fools of actual actors is a sad state of affairs, isn't it? I know, but hey, that's show business, right? Yeah. I don't want people to worry too much about the people who set this up because during the boom,

the one thing if you want to grow a unicorn and if you want to become a startup that just has real staying power is you don't sell your shares, you never sell them. These guys all did. They tucked a few shares away. They sold them. So they already made some money back in the early 2020s. So now when they're sort of short on cash, they have all cashed in already. So they have feathered their nests, which is not what you're supposed to do, but it's what they've done.

So I don't want people to feel sorry for the people behind Cameo. You know, it is a shame because it's a they've done. So I don't want people to feel sorry for the people behind Cameo. You know, it is a shame because it's a really nice idea. It brings joy to an awful lot of people. It's really simple. It connects people who have something to sell with people who want something to buy. You know, it's a lovely little business, like a bike shop on the high street. It's a little business.

Yeah. Can I tell you the most lockdown story imaginable? Carol Baskin from Tiger King. This was the huge Netflix documentary that was just like an absolute monster pandemic hit. Yeah, that everyone watched during lockdown. So they signed her up during lockdown. She made $130,000 in her first week. I mean, there you go. That's a bubble. Get it while you can, Carol. Some of the names that we've used in that segment might not be on Cameo. We're just using them as illustrative examples. That sounds like a legal thing you've just been asked to say by a producer. Is that right?

I'm afraid it is, yes. Wow. I wonder what it is. Who have we mentioned? He's heard something, hasn't he, Neil? He's heard something. He's gone, do you know what? Virgo will come for us. See, Virgo was definitely on it. He may not still be there. I don't know.

Brian Cox was definitely on it, but is no longer on it. Shall we have some adverts? Let's please. Welcome back, everybody. Now, we are now going to talk about Fast TV, which is free and supported television. Tubi. I want to say Tub free ad supported television, Tubi. I want to say Tubi. Tubi, Tubi.

Tubi, it's very American, but I want in the way that I want to say JZ. I want to say Tubi or not Tubi, which is the pronunciation. Yeah. Now this is a service that recently launched in the UK. They've been going in America for some time. These free ad supported channels, they've been going in America for some time. These free ad-supported channels, they have bigger market share than things like HBO, Paramount Plus and Peacock altogether, that's NBC. I mean, Tubi's as big as Disney Plus, which

a lot of people don't realize. Yeah, so over here, the story of the last few years has been we have these big premium streaming services, the Netflixes and as you say all of that and the Amazon Prime's and that's the way the TV's going and it's killing linear television and people just want to pay their X pound a month and have these incredible streaming services with really high end content. What's happened in America, and I suspect will happen over here, is these channels have sprung up all over the place, Chibi Roku, there's absolutely loads of them Pluto

TV, which is owned by Paramount. And they are completely free. They are ad supported, where did they get that idea from? And there are thousands and thousands of these channels. So I say these fast channels, you could this whole channel, which is just homes under the hammer. There's a whole channel, which is just pointless, I discovered my absolute horror the other day. So if you want a cameo from me, just go on that and you can probably cut out each individual word to build whatever you need. People are loving this and people are mainly loving it because it's free. And actually

that idea that all we want is premium TV and new shows, that's for quite a small amount of people. Yeah, it's for people who write in newspapers. I'm sorry to say that content is not a meritocracy, that content is completely subservient to distribution. People don't care whether they're watching your 6.9 rating murder mystery or somebody else's 5.7. So little consumption of content is must have. Things like Game of Thrones, they were must have, but how much of

that is there honestly out there? And what people actually want is called saliency bias. They want the thing that is in front of them and they click on it. 80% of Netflix journeys are via the Netflix button. You start and you go and look around what's on, okay. All this kind of like destination stuff. It's nonsense. I'm sorry to say that distribution is far more important than content.

And that's the fascinating thing with, with Tubi and all of these is yet it plays into that thing that yes, everyone talks about the amount of hours in their catalog and I think Tubi in America has got 200,000 hours. And most of Netflix is a very similar 200,000 hours, apart from, as you say, the big sort of marquee things. So the business model of all of these things is, if you don't really, really need to see these big new things, all you want is the rest of the 200,000 hours, then just come here.

You know, you're not paying the ad load, the amount of adverts you see in an hour is actually lower than it would be on terrestrial TV. It's about eight minutes an hour instead of 12 minutes an hour. So it's a fairly seamless experience. As you say, that thing, the passivity, which we took absolutely for granted as kids and people of our generation of,

you turn on the TV and you watch what is on. And if it's not the thing you want, you switch over to BBC two or ITV or channel four, and then you watch what's on there. The received wisdom is that that's the thing that's disappeared completely because we have absolute total choice. And so we can, you know, we can browse and browse and browse until we find the thing we want. But human beings don't really like too much choice. You know, we have absolute choice paralysis, there's so much on. And so this idea that you can literally just go down the fast channels and go, oh, there's homes under the hammer. There's a

place in the sun. There's come dying with me. And you just watch that. You watch the episode that they've put on at that moment for you. You watch if you're adverse. You watch the next episode that's on. I always think if I watch Frasier in the morning on Channel 4, I could find any of those episodes at any point and watch Frasier. I could download it. I could watch it whenever I want. But I have never done that in my life. But lots of mornings, I will literally turn the TV on

and there's Niles and there's Frasier and I'll sit and watch it. And the thing that people said was that, you know, young people, oh, you know, they want Destination View. They go there, and they don't want any ads, because they're not used to them. They've grown up with YouTube. They'll watch a ton of ads. They like things to be free, and they don't mind ads.

And they also don't just want short form video, which is another thing people say. They really like long things. They like lots of long form things. And they want to sit in front of it. Again, we come back to this saliency bias thing. As people always say, if you want to hide something and have nobody find it, put it on the second page of the Google searches.

And this is why people spend such a lot of money in the EPG, the Electronic Programming Guide, to be up there near the top because people get very bored scrolling down. What it shows to us again is that content providers are just totally subservient to the platform owners and to the platforms. And once you've got people on your platform, you don't really have to serve them a gourmet meal. This has been the evolution of digital TV, is that people thinking, oh, yeah, I know that no one will watch any ads, none of this sort of stuff. People are wrong again. And as we've discussed, all of these streaming services are bringing out these free tiers because people want free things and they feel that they have to have a free tier because otherwise they're going to lose out to these ones that are only free.

And also, by the way, when we talk about shows being non-premium, if I sit and watch Border Patrol Australia, that's a brilliantly made television show. These shows are brilliantly made. It's not trash. It's not swill. These are made by program makers who love it and who have a format and it's compelling to people. So it's not like, oh, we'll put out any old rubbish. There is such an enormous back catalog over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years of great television shows which you very, very happily sit down, have on in the background while you're on your phone doing something else as well.

And that is an enormous market. That's an easier way for them to get into streaming and to go straight to Netflix. If my mom goes on Netflix, she doesn't know when things are on. So you know, whereas with this, you're like, okay, I can turn on this and I can watch, you know, Judge Judy all day long. It's one of those lovely kind of sweet spot markets that we lost between us telling ourselves endlessly that linear TV was over and between saying that, you know, these Game of Thrones type shows are the future of television.

Right in the middle, as always in culture, is pretty much everyone. And pretty much everyone is the target market for Tubi and Roku and Freebie and all of these things which are going to get bigger and bigger, I think. Tubi is owned by Forks. And as we said, they launched last month, I think in the UK. How do you think it's going to fare in the UK market, which as we know has lots of great free-to-air television and free-to-air linear television, and the channels are easy to find. They have great access to prominence. It's a different proposition.

What they've said is, we're going to try and serve more niche audiences. We're going to try and fandoms and communities and things like that. We've seen that supposedly underestimated audiences, non-median viewers, things like that. And we've seen that, like supposedly underestimated audiences, non-median viewers, things like Romantic, that genre which we've talked about, something that has just been missed by an industry. I think they're going to have to sort of, they're going to do some originals, but they're going to have to, they are going to have to go a little bit more niche because the mainstream free is very well catered for. Well, I think that's the fascinating thing over here is it's about to show us something very interesting.

It's about to highlight something very interesting that already exists. Now in this industry, Netflix are fine, YouTube are fine. They're both around 10% of viewing and they know their business. They do it incredibly well. The trouble is for the smaller streamers, the Disney Pluses, the Amazon Primes, Apples, all of that kind of stuff. But it's mad that we're talking about something like Disney as one of the smaller streamers, the Disney Pluses, the Amazon Primes, Apples, all of that kind of stuff. But it's mad that we're talking about something like Disney as one of the smaller streamers

and a lot of people won't get that because it seems so prestige, it seems so big, they have these huge, big shows that they spend a massive amount of money on. And this, as you say, it's about to show us something. Yeah. Well, I think what it's about to show us is we already have some of the greatest fast TV in the world So you got all four which is channel for well, that's been for a D I think it might just be called channel for now, but that is their their streaming proposition. We have ITV X We have my five. I mean I player doesn't even have adverts. We already have this

extraordinary bank of programs and programming and the executives at those channels worked out this was coming a very long time ago and have built this stuff up and extraordinary bank of programs and programming, and the executives at those channels worked out this was coming a very long time ago and have built this stuff up. Channel 4 have been very good at really, really skewing all four as young as they possibly can, and spearheaded by things like Married at First Sight and Taskmaster, because they sort of know that this is where most of streaming is going. There's always going to be, as I say, YouTube is always going to be fine. Netflix is always going to be fine up to the point where something catastrophic happens.

But for the rest of that industry, actually, there's a lot of eyeballs to be won. There's a lot of money to be made and ITV Channel 4 and BBC all have a big advantage, which in the States doesn't really exist. So I think Tubi will find it harder. But I think, weirdly, when you present something that you've already had as something new, people love the novelty of it. So you can find Tubi on your smart TV and download it and look through it. And actually people will enjoy doing that. And it will take about 18 months before you go, oh, but hold on there.

I've got another channel that's like this, haven't I? ITVX, which has got loads and loads of big dramas that's not on that. And it will take about 18 months before you go, oh, but hold on there. I've got another channel that's like this, haven't I? ITVX, which has got loads and loads of big dramas that's not on that. You think, oh, I'm going to spend some time on that as well. This stuff already exists in our country and already has its incredible bank of programming. It's just we talk a lot about the fact that billions and billions and billions and billions

have been spent to get us back to exactly where we started. Linear TV, as we know it, will be dismantled at some point, but the heart of it, you hope that Channel 4 and ITV and BBC are able to use this new world and this massive market to still stay relevant, to still stay profitable and still be investing in original British programming. So I think probably it's quite a hopeful story. Yeah. Marina, shall we talk about China? Let's please China and the entertainment industry. There's been a huge story.

This week, a computer game was released called Black Myth Wukong. It's a Chinese studio called Game Science, and it's pretty much the first, they call it a premium AAA game, very, very high production values. I should say it's got a Monkey King as the main character, based on this kind of Chinese cultural epic called Journey to the West from the 16th century. But anyway, by Wednesday, it topped the charts worldwide on Steam, which is one of the platforms you can play it on. It had over 2.2 million peak concurrent users, which means that it's been the most popular

game in Steam's global history. And Steam is the single number one site. If you're the most popular on Steam, you are the most popular in the world. Yeah. So this is extraordinary. It's got masses of press in the Chinese state media, as you can imagine. They've been really iffy about gaming, by the way, in China, because they felt like people are becoming addicted.

I mean, we know the feeling. People are becoming addicted. They had a console ban until 2014. So 10 years ago, you couldn't even use a PlayStation. This game, you don't need a VPN for it on Steam. So that's a change. And the Chinese state media have called it a cross-cultural bridge. So there's a real change in attitude. They've allowed the creators to have interviews in state media, things like that. One of the drawbacks, Western live streamers who are a big way of getting any game out, you're warned not to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes any words like quarantine

or isolation, feminist propaganda, not entirely clear in what context you might discuss that, and no other content that instigates negative discourse. So there's been a whole like, oh no, look, you know, the censorship of the games. Well, it's really interesting to see that this is now a premium cultural product that has come, I want to say this way, it sounds like I'm anchored, but this is, you know, we make our podcasts in the UK and this is what we're talking about. This has gone westwards, this, and it's become a huge hit. Now, the West attempts to push culture the other way into China, which have been enormous.

And a lot of people are completely unaware of this, but it has been massive. And I'm going to just talk a little bit about Hollywood if I can, because I think that's an interesting way into it. Recently, another movie that came out, Alien Romulus, that is hugely overperformed in the Chinese box office, which is sort of amazing and the dream and has been the dream of Hollywood now for decades. And it has sometimes happened, but the reason they wanted it to perform is the US box office basically needs, or box office in America

in the Hollywood film industry needs nine or 10 billion to stay as it is. And in a world where theaters are shutting every week, where people aren't going to the cinema, to have access to China, which briefly in the pandemic became the biggest movie going audience in the world, was huge. And Hollywood has done everything for it. And it's done it all covertly. And it's very, very bad, I think. Let's look at the Chinese censorship department. Now, they re-allowed movies in the end of the 80s, at the start of the 90s. You were allowed once more to watch foreign movies in China. They were completely banned under the Cultural Revolution. But

they had a quota. So you were allowed 20 Hollywood films, 14 what they call commercial films, and they wanted those things to be very technology-based, like IMAX, 3D, things like that. They needed the product, basically, to get their film industry off the ground. And America, obviously, needed the money. So if you've lost money on a US screen, say, the sheer volume of people that may potentially see your movie in China could help you recuperate. This is a place where movie theaters are still opening. The government directed building of 100,000 cinemas. So this is the sort of dream in lots of ways. That's a lot of pick and mix.

It's a huge amount of pick and mix. But in order to make the quota, certain themes could not be portrayed. This is why you show me a movie, a Hollywood movie in which you've seen a Chinese villain for 20 years, you haven't seen anything like this. You show me a movie which talks negatively about the Chinese government. They don't, okay? You've got the obvious things, the three T's they call them, Tibet, Tiananmen, and Taiwan. Anything remotely connected to those has just been stripped out of films. Any actor who's by mistake called John Cena in Fast Nine,

he accidentally on a promo tour referred to Taiwan as a country, he had to do a huge apology video when it wasn't quite clear what he was apologizing for because he couldn't use the word Taiwan. And there are these Chinese consultants who will come on your movie set and explain how best to appeal so that you can make it onto the quota. And for a long, long time, Hollywood did everything they could to do this. So for a lot of people, it explains what's happened to cinema over the last, I don't know, 20 years when you think, oh, I see, they've been marketing actually at Chinese teenagers and not Western adults.

And it's fascinating that it doesn't massively work. I mean, as you say, Alien has done good, but since I think it did $26 million or something, but very, very, very few Hollywood movies in even the top 100 highest grossing movies in China of all time. Because the Chinese film industry is enormous, but almost all based in China. Chinese films are the biggest ever movie there. It's become really good now.

Yeah, the batter that Lake Chongjin is the biggest grossing Chinese movie ever. It's made almost a billion dollars and no one outside China has really seen this movie. And it was produced on behalf of the central propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, I have seen quite a few Hollywood war movies that feel like that the other way. Exactly. Chinese Communist Party. I mean, I have seen quite a few Hollywood war movies that feel like that the other way. Exactly. The jingoism, we can't turn our eyes to our own forms of jingoism. The interesting thing about the word propaganda in China is it's not seen in a pejorative

way at all, in the way that probably wasn't in America 40, 50 years ago. They call it main melody. Those movies are called main melody. Patriotic themes are anything. Main melody movies is a patriotic theme wolf warrior to another absolutely enormous one But they don't really play outside China particularly and and there's a number of quite interesting reasons for that So president Xi who you know is across everything wants bridges to be built to the West Culturally because you can see the soft power of movies, of games, of all things like that. However, he is not capable of letting anything that might be negative about China getting

out there. So it's actually very hard to make and sell films, certainly contemporary films. And if you're a Chinese filmmaker, you can't make exactly the film you want to make. And also, why would you? Because there's enough money to be made within China. So there's not really been the will in China to make stuff that the West will love and Black Myth Wukong is the first thing really to have made that bridge. And that of course is a story, which is the sort of story they can tell, which

you say is the journey to the West, which is exactly what Monkey, the program that we used to watch in the eighties, exactly the same thing. And that's a story they can tell. They can tell historical epics. That is main melody, big time. Exactly that. So they can do that. And it's interesting with black myth because steam is available in China.

And so those two million concurrent streamers, it's hard to tell how many of those are actually in China or the environs of China anyway. So it might just be that suddenly that enormous block of Chinese gamers have elevated this to a place that we've never seen a game before. But the interesting thing when you talk about Taiwan, and it used to be Hong Kong as well. So China haven't really exported big movies to the West, but Taiwan certainly have and Hong Kong definitely did. Loads of brilliant action directors and huge films that have come out of both of those markets.

So that's because they're not under the same censorship rules. So even Black Myth Wukong is made, as you say, by Game Science. Game Science is owned by Tencent, which is one of the biggest companies in the whole world. And Tencent essentially work within procedures that are set out by the Chinese government. So it's not state owned, but it might as well be state owned. It's certainly state sanctioned. But if you're in Taiwan or if you're previously in Hong Kong, you can do stuff outside.

The big new show from Taiwan, which is going to be fascinating. You can see a trailer. It's like a 17-minute trailer for this. It's really, really, really worth watching. It's fascinating. It's called Zero Day. Oh yeah, I've heard of this, yeah. Eight different Taiwanese directors just telling the story

of individual Taiwanese people. There's a false flag operation. China are about to invade Taiwan and it's about the days of these people when that happens. And that is something that you can make in Taiwan and you can send abroad, and I suspect might be a big hit in other countries. But China doesn't have that,

Chinese filmmakers don't have that flexibility. And also they just have this absolutely enormous market at home. There's a billion people who can go and watch their movies. So those are the movies they're making, but. Yeah, the first time to see the top 10 films in the charts are all Chinese made. They don't really need Western product anymore, and it's quite embarrassing when you think

of how far the West has bent over for that stuff. Things like the Nine Dash Line, which is the demarcation line on a map that China uses to show its kind of territorial claims over basically the whole South China Sea. It's very, very contentious in places like the Philippines and Malaysia and Vietnam. And you notice on films like Barbie, they have this crazy map of the world, you know, where she's, where she's trying to find out how to get to the real world or whatever. But there were some little dashes around the bit that was sorted by China. Now the Barbie filmmakers are like, no, no, no, no, we definitely didn't do that.

I don't know what to say about that. People in Warner's say, no, no, no, we definitely didn't do that. I've spoken to people, but I have to say, it doesn't look great. Now, Abominable, which was a DreamWorks animation, that quite literally, there's a map in that, it does have the nine dash line on it, and this is purely to get it into China. Now that meant that it was banned in the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. So you've got all these sorts of things and I should say it's not limited particularly to the film industry. It's somewhat something like John Stewart. John Stewart who was the kind of legend, he's now

returned once a one night a week to The Daily Show, but he was the legendary host of The Daily Show. His next venture really was a podcast with Apple. It all seemed to be going all right, and then it ended very abruptly by mutual agreement. It was because China, as a topic, just made Apple really, really nervous. Why is Apple in TV? We've talked about this before, or podcast, or whatever it is. It's basically to sell you Apple products. Now, China is a fifth of Apple's sales, and it's the fastest growing market for them. It's a hugely significant manufacturing base for the company. And so it just really isn't worth having people saying things.

So what it really means is that the Chinese government effectively censors US, UK creative content. Yeah, I'll say two things about that. One is, yes, it doesn't work. There isn't a huge amount of money being made there because the Chinese creative industries are fairly self-contained and they have the stuff that they want already. So we've been chasing that stuff for a long time. The censorship thing is interesting because I've spent a lot of time in China and I love China, I love the Chinese people and so my books are published in China. So you have to think various countries do you want your books published, but I love the Chinese people so much, my books have always been published there. And occasionally they'll have censorship questions, but none of them comes to anything. They know the things they're supposed to ask, but actually... That's interesting.

Yeah, the stuff gets... That's interesting. Yeah, the stuff gets... What sort of things do you get asked? It's usually stuff around sexuality, which, as I say, I think there's a checklist they're supposed to go down and the second you go, actually, I think it's okay, they go, oh, okay, yeah, no, we can do that. Some people have allowed their things to be changed totally, which I find sort of bizarre.

Fight Club, they were so desperate so many years after it had actually come out to get it released in China that it has a completely altered ending. There's a text screen which explains that the authorities triumphed after figuring out Project Mayhem's plan and that Tyler Durden was committed to a psychiatric institution. I'm not going to spoil the actual movie for you, but I just suffice to say that's not the same as the movie I saw. It's a better ending. I think it's a better ending. But the other, genuinely, there's a fascinating thing, which is China would

of course love the soft power of having a big movie open abroad. There is something about the way they use their propaganda, the way they have to tell stories that is stopping that. And they can't find a way around that, which is why we haven't had a big Chinese movie. It's just, it's, it's, it's not a thing they are capable of doing, even though they would like to. So they will, they will learn how to do it in the same way that people thought that you couldn't have capitalism without democracy.

Well, it's quite clear from what's happened that you can have it. And they will find a way, just as they found a way to bring this game out. And they will find a way, not as they found a way to bring this game out, and they will find a way, not just by covertly funding films and by effectively censoring US and UK and global films in order to get access to their market. They will find a way of getting things into the primary market.

I don't know that they will. I think there's something in the middle of that equation that is broken that's going to make it very very hard to do That's my two penneth on it. I think life will find a way Any recommendations this week? I have got a great fun one I went on Monday to see the classic novel 39 steps done as a comedy in which four actors play all the parts I I'm sorry. I'm such a Philistan, didn't see it first time round but the script and the staging and everything is so good I really

recommend it. It's at the Trafalgar Theatre in London and I had a great time. Excellent. Shall we do a question and answer episode this week? I think we absolutely should do on Thursday. Please keep your questions coming to therestisentertainment.gmail.com. There is a deluge of them, but keep the deluge going. I'm just going to go and check into Cameo. Yeah, now's the time to launch. Very, very late adopting. Do you know what? I think now's the sweet spot. See you on Thursday.

See you on Thursday. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]