The Marvel Cinematic Universe in China

As China's economy has burgeoned, so have the revenues of its movie theaters. On average the Chinese remain poorer than their American counterparts (with a per capita GDP of $10,000, as against $63,000 for the U.S., in 2020). Still, at $9 billion in 2019 the gross of the Chinese "box office" was not so far behind its $11-$12 billion American counterpart in that last "normal" year for the movies, and amid the pandemic has actually outperformed America's here (in 2021 selling $7 billion worth of tickets, versus the under $5 billion North America managed), making China, for now, the world's biggest film market.

Of course, long before it got to this point the Chinese box office was too big for Hollywood to ignore, and getting a piece of that action has driven a great deal of Hollywood's decision-making, to the point that a number of big-budget Hollywood features would likely not have been made at all without the expectation that they would appeal to Chinese filmgoers (like Pacific Rim: Uprising or Warcraft). A good many more films saw creative choices intended to add to their appeal or interest in that specific market (like the casting of Chinese star Angelababy in Independence Day: Resurgence).

In substantial part because the people who run Hollywood are profoundly ignorant not only of Chinese culture, but even the strengths and weaknesses of their own product, these efforts have often been spectacularly unsuccessful. (Disney, for example, apparently in denial over the extent to which the Star Wars franchise is living off of nostalgia, failed miserably to interest the Chinese public--which has no nostalgia for Star Wars, having been in a very different place way back in 1977--in that franchise. The same company's effort to sell its live-action remake of Mulan was similarly ill-conceived--that movie, like Crazy Rich Asians, made with American audiences and concerns, not Chinese audiences and concerns, in mind, and simple-mindedly thought they would translate automatically and fully.)

Still, if Hollywood's failures in China have been as colossal as they were predictable, it has also had successes. The Fast and Furious franchise has been very big indeed in China. And Marvel has also done very well. So far as I can tell, of the 23 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies released between 2008 and 2019, 21 were released in China (all but Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger back in 2011). Collectively they made $3 billion, most of that in the most recent years as Marvel's earnings, growing along with those of the Chinese box office generally, exploded. In 2019 Avengers: Endgame took in over $600 million by itself (a sum few movies achieve from even their global releases)--while Spider-Man: Far From Home and Captain Marvel took in another $350 million or so, with the result that in that one year alone Marvel sold nearly a billion dollars' worth of tickets, a rough fifth of the $5 billion the three blockbusters took in globally that year.

As all this demonstrates, China was at that point a hugely important market for the brand, and showed every promise of becoming still more lucrative. However, Marvel's winning streak in China ended with "Phase 3" of the MCU. Phase 4, which launched with Black Widow, has consistently struck out, with not a single one of its movies landing a release in that country. To date this comes to five first-rate blockbusters (besides Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and now it seems, also Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) which could have picked up at least another half billion, and perhaps much more. Bad enough for the company ordinarily, it was worse still amid the pandemic, with Hollywood not only needing every penny it could get, but China relatively close to normal because of its comparative success in keeping the spread of the disease in check. And now one might wonder if Marvel is not out of China for a good long time.

Of course, the last few months offer some reassurance that Marvel can get along without China. In spite of not being release there Spider-Man: No Way Home made nearly $2 billion, while Doctor Strange is closing in on the $1 billion mark. Still, the diminution of the films' revenue by possibly hundreds of millions of dollars each is far from trivial, and in its way also ominous. It may be coincidence that Marvel just happened to produce a succession of projects particularly offensive to the sensibilities of Chinese authorities (the "anti-Communist" and "anti-Russian" Black Widow, the evocations of Victorian-Edwardian racism in the Fu Manchu-inspired Shang Chi, the public criticism of the Chinese government by Eternals director Chloe Zhao, etc.), and later projects will not run into such obstacles, and Marvel and China will make up. However, it may also be that the Chinese authorities are raising the bar of political acceptability. (After all, Marvel's Iron Man 3, in spite of its having the Mandarin for a villain--in however modified a form--got not only a wide Chinese release but Chinese financial backing via DMG Entertainment.) Moreover, such a turn on the part of the Chinese authorities may not only be because their ever-bigger market gives them more leverage, or because they want to bolster their own film industry, but because the political winds inside the country are shifting in a more nationalistic direction (certainly to go by what we are seeing of China's own movies, with hits like Wolf Warrior 2 and Operation Red Sea and The Battle at Lake Changjin). At the same time Hollywood may grow less hopeful of access to the Chinese market, and perhaps, especially in the wake of the success of Top Gun 2, find more nationalistic filmmaking more appealing financially as well in the circumstances. Running all too parallel to the disturbing and frightening course of international politics in recent years, and recent months, it is a reminder that frivolous as box office grosses and the like seem, they are far from being untouched by the hard politics of a very troubled world.