Today, Explained - China’s grip on Hollywood

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Warner Bros. is censoring the newest Fantastic Beasts movie for Chinese audiences. It’s the latest reminder that Hollywood’s reliance on China comes at a cost. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro and Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Dominguez, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What you're doing is madness. Opening in theaters in the U.S. this weekend, Fantastic Beasts, The Secrets of Dumbledore. It was you who said we could reshape the world. One of Dumbledore's secrets. I was in love with you. He was in love with a man. Moviegoers in China won't hear that part. Warner Brothers cut it. Memory is everything.

Without it, we are blind. Without it, we leave the plate of our world to chance. Since the 90s, Hollywood has grown to rely on the big bucks that Chinese audiences bring in, but it has to answer to Chinese censors. I'm sorry to disturb you, Albus, but I've just received troubling news. Tell me, what is it? It's Grindelwald. Coming up on Today Explained,

a cinematic rivalry, an anxious Hollywood, a lot of money, and a wolf warrior. Things are not quite what they appear. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, today, explain. Eric Schwartzel, reporter for The Wall Street Journal. You've got a new book out, Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Can we go back into history a little bit? Of course. What was the first Hollywood movie to earn real money in China?

The first movie let into China after the Cultural Revolution through an official channel was The Fugitive. The only thing checkpoints are going to do is get a lot of good people frantic around here and flood my office with calls. Well, shit, Sheriff, I'd hate to see that happen, so I guess I'll take over your investigation. Starring Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, the guy jumping off the water dam.

Big, massive movie here in the U.S. Great airplane movie, I will say. Possibly great movie just in general. I would agree. I would agree. But just like that perfect, that perfect kind of airplane film, right? Just like always happy to see it.

Whoa. What happened? Where'd he go? We're going to get a Peter Pan right here off of this dam right here. This is the first movie let into China, and this is in 1994. And a couple things are happening. China's economy is modernizing and incorporating itself into the Western economy more and more. This is still before China would join the WTO, but we're starting to see more of that economic outreach. The other thing that's happening

is that Chinese movie theaters are really struggling because after the Cultural Revolution, the movie theaters reopened, but really the only thing to see in China were these medicinal propaganda movies produced by the government. And whenever pirated movies started coming into the country, TV started proliferating, and even like karaoke lounges grew more popular, people stopped going to the movies because

there wasn't anything good to go see. And so Hollywood executives who were in the region convinced Chinese theater owners and then Chinese authorities to let in Hollywood movies to help goose those ticket sales. And The Fugitive was the first one in, and then several others would follow to about 10 a year. Okay, The Fugitive was the first one in. Did Chinese viewers like it? They loved it.

Yes! Audiences would burst into applause. This was the kind of Western Hollywood spectacle that had swept the globe. I didn't kill my wife! I don't care! There was a reason why the American movie was the culturally dominant medium of the 20th century, but it was a medium that had been largely shut off to China in the 20th century because Mao Zedong and his successors

had kept most Western influence out of the country. So this was just a bit of a mind-blowing experience for a lot of Chinese audiences. They went back again and again and again. But of course, the irony is that the country was still severely underscreened. There weren't a lot of theaters there. And tickets were so cheap that the movie was an absolute blockbuster despite only making

$3 million. Okay, it only makes $3 million, but Hollywood clearly has an idea that there's something here. Right. I mean, the math is very easy, right? You need to remember one number, 1.4 billion people. There you go. When you do that math, you start to see how China becomes this, really, this place of hopes and dreams. And then what's interesting is it goes from a place of optimistic projections to a financial savior. Because around 2008, Hollywood's business

plans have to undergo a complete revolution. The first thing that happens is that movies like Iron Man start getting produced. You've been called the Da Vinci of our time. What do you say to that? Absolutely ridiculous. I don't paint. And what do you say to your other nickname, the Merchant of Death? That's not bad. And these are movies that are massively expensive and require global audiences to turn a profit. The other thing that happens, I have to say as a child of the 90s, this was a very fun thing to explore,

is the DVD boom collapses. And this was fascinating because I think it's easy to forget now just how popular DVDs were at the time. But I was reading these articles in the archives about lines forming outside Walmart because Finding Nemo was out on DVD. Nemo! And then almost overnight, those sales plummet. Nemo! Nemo! No, no, please no!

And a lot of the revenue that the studios were counting on goes with it. And so China suddenly becomes this place not just of optimistic projections, but a place that they need desperately to work. I'm assuming that when Hollywood movies entered the Chinese market, they did not just appear on screen as we would have seen them here in the United States, right? There was some censorship at play? This is the other major element of the equation here, which is that every movie playing in China has to be approved by Communist Party censors. So that means that Hollywood started to realize

that in order to maintain access to this lucrative and essential new market, they would have to make movies that wouldn't get them in trouble. And so that meant submitting movies that would occasionally have scenes cut here and there, like a line of dialogue or maybe a shot that was considered too graphic, but also just avoiding themes altogether. And it ranged from the large to small. I mean, there's an example of a Mission Impossible movie featuring a scene in Shanghai in which Tom Cruise is running through the streets. And he runs by laundry drying on clotheslines outside. And the Chinese authorities requested that it be edited from the shot because they

thought it made China look more backwards than they actually were. And then there are bigger examples like in the film adaptation of World War Z, the original cut of that film featured a scene that implies that the zombie outbreak has originated in China. And that is a choice that the author of the book had very deliberately made. But when Paramount was looking at the movie and thinking, maybe this might get into China, they took it out preemptively. Before the censors could even weigh in, they took it out to say, you know, this will help our

chances. Nonetheless, it still didn't get in. But it was an example of some of the preemptive self-censorship that studios started doing to get into the Chinese market. Out of wild curiosity, did Paramount take the China origin story out of the American version too? I remember seeing that movie in the theater and I can't remember. They did. They did. And the origin could have come from anywhere. It's a shame you had to fly all the way out here to figure that out. This is another critical difference between China and other foreign markets. I think

a lot of Hollywood executives would tell you, you know, we censor movies all the time. We censor movies for airplanes. But the key difference is that China has an economic leverage past that if Hollywood studios make a movie that it doesn't like for any number of reasons, they will perhaps not let their next five movies in, or they might stall those plans to build a theme park in the mainland. Is there a set of rules that China has handed to Hollywood and said, this is what you have to do, these are the steps that you have to take if you want this movie to air in China? Yes, there are literal rules. You know, there's some easy rules like no masturbation. That one you can kind of read a script and figure out. But then there are other more thematic rules like no negative outlooks on life, no portrayals of suicide. Obviously, things like government corruption is off the table as well. I should

say government corruption in China. It's fine if there's government corruption in other countries on screen. I think another crucial part of the playbook is just learning from example. So there have been a number of examples where Hollywood studios have not seen their movies get into China, and it allows all the other studios to learn what to avoid, right? So if Disney gets in trouble for making a movie about the Dalai Lama, everybody knows to avoid the Dalai Lama. If World War Z doesn't get in or has to change a scene involving a zombie outbreak, everybody knows, hey, let's avoid any implication

that China is a source of ill will toward the world. What's the example of the peak Chinified Hollywood movie? There was a moment where things got very silly, very fast. The movie that I would encourage everyone to watch as the premier case study in this was released in 2014. It was called Transformers Age of Extinction. My name is Optimus Prime. My Autobots, they're in danger it's the fourth film in the

transformers franchise starring mark walberg and stanley tucci and it is an example of a hollywood blockbuster just doing everything it can to appeal to the chinese Oh, they're not taking me anywhere. I'm an American. Okay, sweetheart. Okay, okay, okay. All right, okay. All right. I was wrong. There are Chinese actors and actresses galore.

About a third of it takes place in China and Hong Kong. And there's product placement everywhere you look. And not all of it makes sense. There's a scene in which Mark Wahlberg has to raid a convenience store in Chicago. Conveniently, this convenience store sells Chinese protein powder. What'd you guys get? It's protein.

Look, I said the essentials, okay? Oh, Stanley Tucci has this like big moment with a Chinese juice box. It's everywhere when you start looking for it. But there's a moment in the film that I think, in retrospect, takes a bit of a darker turn. There's a scene toward the end when Hong Kong is being destroyed by the giant robots. And there's a rather random cut to a defense minister in Beijing. And it's not really clear why we're going to see him at the moment. And he's informed of the robot destruction in Hong Kong.

And he says, Beijing will protect Hong Kong at all costs. And I thought to myself, what a random moment in this climactic battle scene to include. So when I was asking executives involved with the film, they said, oh, yeah, when we went to Beijing to get permission to do all this China filming, we gave the script to the authorities. And they had one request. And the request was that at the end, when Hong Kong is being attacked, they wanted Beijing to come to the rescue before the American heroes did. Years later, now that we know Beijing's approach toward Hong Kong and how it has exerted heavier

and heavier control over the past several years. This movie that came out eight years ago and stars Mark Wahlberg, it really starts to look like instead actually something of a prequel to what was going to happen to Hong Kong overall, hidden in this Hollywood movie that, frankly, not a lot of people took very seriously. Thank you. to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Eric, in the first half of the show, you told us how Hollywood tied its fortune to the Chinese box office. But we left off around 2014. That was when Transformers Age of Extinction hit the theaters. And then when President Trump was elected, there was a big geopolitical shift because he launched a trade war with China. You look at what they're doing with the way they steal our intellectual property, our intellectual rights. I mean, it's crazy what they're doing. How did the politics affect the movie business? Well, it came at a terrible time.

Around 2016 or 2017, Hollywood was all in on China. I mean, it was not uncommon for a big movie like an Avengers release to make $400, $500 dollars in the market. Wow. Not all of that was flowing back to the studios, but it would sometimes mean the difference between profit and loss on these major releases. And so Hollywood, frankly, took a bit of a duck and cover approach and tried their damnedest not to get sucked up in the broader trade war. And I will say, like, Hollywood, where the executives tend to be more liberal or progressive, there would often be executives who would kind of sheepishly say to me, like, I can't agree with Trump on anything, but I do think he has a point about China because for the past decade or so,

they had been dealing with some of those same issues, whether it came to intellectual property protections or the requirement to do business with a local partner in China that would often result in losing majority control. I mean, even companies as big and powerful as Disney had to deal with this. When Disney was building Shanghai Disneyland, the massive theme park right outside of the city, they had to take a minority stake in the venture. That park is majority owned by Chinese entities who collect a majority of the revenue on all the ticket sales, all the toy sales. So this was a reality that Hollywood had to deal with, as a lot of other industries did as well.

In response, did China start to limit the number of Hollywood movies that could come into the country? Not at first. So the number of movies let into China continued to flow. But what we saw was something very interesting happening in China, which was China's film industry grew more commercial. And frankly, the movies got a lot better. And Chinese audiences started to prefer to see Chinese movies to the American movies. And this should not have come as a surprise to Hollywood, and yet it did. And so a lot of Chinese movies started coming out, movies that most listeners will have never heard of, but still nonetheless would make $600 or $700 million at the box office.

$600 or $700 million at the box office. $600 or $700 million? Routinely. Routinely. These numbers, they make Hollywood executives break into a cold sweat because when a movie is a hit in a country that big, the box office can just explode. Tell me about one of those movies. The best example is a film that came out called Wolf Warrior 2. This came out about five or six years ago, and I think it could best be described as China's version of Rambo. It's about a Chinese soldier who goes to Africa and has to save a group of villagers. They will take us in. We are Chinese. Hey, what about us? What are we supposed to do?

Will they accept us? I have to say, that's our country. Everybody, follow me. And, of course, he gets the girl and outdrinks the other men and flexes his muscles for the screen. I mean, it's a story that we know very well, but I think that we've always just assumed would have an American and a white guy in that role.

And also, America is very deliberately cast as the villain. The main bad guy is an American mercenary named Big Daddy. Now it's a person. Who routinely tells the Chinese hero that America will always be the dominant superpower. People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it. Get fucking used to it. There's a scene in which the UN shows up to help

and their helicopter crashes right away. It's not subtle. And the movie ends with the hero victoriously riding through the streets of this village, waving the Chinese flag. A couple things were happening that made this movie, at the time, the highest gross village waving the Chinese flag. A couple things were happening that made this movie at the time the highest grossing film in Chinese history. One was that there was this surging sense of nationalism in China. And I just have to add here, one of the reasons it was

so appealing and appeared so sophisticated to Chinese audiences is because Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors of the Avengers films, were executive producers on it, and they helped make it better. How have Hollywood movies been doing in China in the years since Wolf Warrior 2 came out? For a while, things were going okay. And it was a place where you could ship a big movie, and if it was a big movie in the U.S., chances are it would be a big movie in China. So something like Avengers Endgame did spectacularly well there.

Then there was a real shift, and it started last year, and the wall started coming up. And a number of big movies like Black Widow and Shang-Chi, a movie featuring Marvel's first lead Asian superhero. And even something like Spider-Man, these massive hits here in the US were rejected for release from China. And it really has caused quite a bit of anxiety and concern in Hollywood because the business models of every major studio have grown to rely on those Chinese grosses. And now it appears as though those grosses are more uncertain than ever. And there are a lot of theories, but no real explanations as to why. Even if Wolf Warrior 2 wasn't a smash globally, China is still trying to export movies like that into places where it has soft power. It still wants its movies seen overseas.

This is something that I gave a lot of thought to because I think looking only at the prospects of a Chinese movie playing in the U.S. is quite myopic because it's a big world out there and there are a lot of places where Chinese investment has really made the country an ubiquitous presence as America has retreated in many of those same places. So I'll give you an example. I spent some time reporting this book in Kenya, where there's

been a surge of Chinese investment and Chinese aid as part of their Belt and Road Initiative, which is this giant effort to reorient global trade routes. There is a soft power element to it. And it's mostly in the form of this initiative called the 10,000 Villages Project. In 2015, the Chinese government launched a project aiming to help 10,000 African villages gain access to satellite TV. It covers over 20 countries in sub-Sahara Africa and over 10,000 villages. And these satellite dishes are Chinese made and carry Chinese movies and Chinese TV shows. So I spent some time far outside Nairobi in villages that received these dishes. And I would walk in in the middle of the afternoon and see families watching Chinese soap operas or Chinese Kung Fu.

One evening I got together for dinner with a family and we watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And it's serving as something of an introduction to this country that has appeared in their own country seemingly overnight. The project has deepened and solidified the bilateral ties, achieving a win-win outcome that brings China and Africa closer. I want to ask you, lastly, where you think this

is all headed. For 100 years, Hollywood sold an idealized version of the United States to the rest of the world. And now it seems like China is trying to do the exact same thing. And I wonder, do you think in the next 20, 30 years, the hero of Wolf Warrior 2, for example, will become as well known across the world as Captain America? It's entirely possible. And it's entirely possible for two reasons. One is the sheer force of China's ambitions and its willingness to eat costs and do what it can to have something of a blunt force impact in these parts of the world where, as I said, almost overnight, they've shown up and built railways and given aid to government executives and presented their mode of governance as

an alternative to Western democracy at a time when Western democracy has looked messy over the past several years. So I think there's that element. But then I think the other reason why I think that's entirely possible is because Hollywood, which would counter any such effort, remains completely beholden to the Chinese market. Despite all of the walls going up that we just referenced, despite movies as big as Spider-Man not getting into the country, it is still too big to ignore. And that means that as the China-U.S. rivalry, frankly, becomes the story of the 21st century, the medium that we've often turned to to interpret those stories

cannot do so in a fulsome manner. Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Tori Dominguez. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you