The result is that it seems only fair to consider that side of the matter in appraising the film's commercial performance. And in doing that it seems fair to start with just why the producers expected the movie to be a great hit in those markets, which seems to be their perception that the movie was profoundly novel in its having an "all-Asian" cast. However, the attitude of some Asian-Americans may be one matter, the attitude of Asians in Asia another. This is most obviously the case in the fact that if for Asian-Americans (or at least, Asian-Americans who watch nothing but Hollywood content) a film with an all-Asian cast has been an extreme rarity, for residents of East Asian, living in a region with a burgeoning output of film and television, this has not been the case. One may add that romantic comedy specifically is a strong presence in that output, such that Hollywood making a romantic comedy with an al-Asian cast is simply not a big deal there in itself, that kind of story one their own industries can and do tell--constantly. (For a very small taste of this, just check out the sheer number of versions of live-action adaptations of Yoko Kamio's classic manga Hana Yori Dango in the Wikipedia listing devoted to them.) Meanwhile the particular material Crazy Rich Asians offered was more problematic than the aforementioned Hollywood geniuses realized--or could. From the standpoint of a certain kind of American petty bourgeois seeing members of "their own group at the top"--seeing them among the rich, stupid, vulgar elite of the modern world, or better still the whole of the rich, stupid, vulgar, elite in some corner of that world, ruling it, and thus by way of them able to vicariously look down on those not in "their own group" as social inferiors is supposed to be inspirational, "aspirational," and outright cause for ecstasy. (Yes, there actually was a certain amount of explicit acknowledgment of this mean-spirited side of identity politics in discussion of the film, entirely uncritical of course.) That not all members of any group really think that way is not something the identity politics-minded mainstream acknowledges. Still less does that mainstream acknowledge that people in other countries may think differently about the matter, in spite of the cultural differences staring them in the face.
Likewise if those emphasizing Chinese Otherness love to speak of Chinese "Confucianism," they forget that Confucianism is not favorably disposed toward a life devoted to individual material gain, merchants, and certainly not a society ruled by merchants, and indeed that much of Chinese history has been a struggle between Confucian scholar-administrators anxious to preserve order and the desire of the merchants to increase their wealth and power (one reason why Western commentators are so often disdainful of Confucianism), with those eras of the merchants' ascendancy identified with hard times for the poor, the spread of slavery, backwardness, chaos--and that this too may color the audience's attitude. Indeed, even in complete ignorance of both Chinese Communism and Chinese Confucianism the fact that capitalistic reform has created in China a very unequal society with its own stupid and vulgar billionaires publicly shooting their mouths off in ways that make clear that they, like their counterparts everywhere else, think the rest of their country and humanity exists only to serve the needs of the super-rich (like Jack Ma), and that much as the American press lionizes them for it the Chinese public generally does not find this endearing--such that China's young people disgusted with the Rat Race and protesting the "996" work culture in such ways as the "Lying Flat" movement--is something they should have noticed. If it has hardly been a complete barrier to the appeal of upper-class glamour (far from it, as even a small taste of the country's film and television shows--again, see Hana Yori Dango), it still raised the likelihood that rather than the spectacle of a bunch of plutocrats living off of the exploitation of the whole rest of the planet being rich and stupid and vulgar and arrogant in Singapore (which, by the way, is to non-Singaporean Chinese another country, a fact overlooked by filmmakers little interested in the cultural differences between the Chinese of the mainland, and those of the Chinese "diaspora," and even different parts of the diaspora (like the Chinese-American heroine, and her Chinese-Singaporean lover and his family) being a thrilling uplift they would be bored, annoyed, even repelled.
At any rate the film failed miserably internationally, not least in Asia, and especially in China, as the hard data shows. Crazy Rich Asians made 73 percent of its money domestically--a very high proportion these days, even more than was the case for such a domestically-oriented, not-for-the-foreigners film as Clint Eastwood's American Sniper with its 63 percent. The second and third biggest markets were actually Western, Anglosphere, Australia and Britain, accounting for another 10 percent by themselves. By contrast the film made a mere $13 million in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia combined, with mainland China kicking in a mere $1.6 million from its whole run, barely enabling it to make not the top 10 or top 20 or even top 100 highest-grossing movies released in China that year (ranking #183), and the lot contributing just 20 percent of the movie's less than towering international gross (some $65 million). At least initially the media registered the impossible-to-deny failure, and even began to talk about some of those basic facts relevant to the situation they had previously ignored, notably the un-specialness of an all-Asian film to an Asian audience not exactly crying out for an Asian-led romantic comedy from Hollywood, and its seeing the movie exactly for the shallow-minded Western product it was in its relation to their values and understanding of their culture, the equivalent in "comedy of manners" terms of what Panda Express is to Asian cuisine according to one commentator. (I have no recollection of their acknowledging how Asians and especially Chinese might be less than thrilled by the particular class politics so prominent in American discussion of the film, but then one could hardly expect the American press to acknowledge that in a public way, can one?)
The result was that the supposed great milestone for Asians on film can in hindsight seem not just a piece of identity politics-pandering crapola pretending to be more than that, but one that may have succeeded even less at the dubious goal of such pandering than at the perhaps even more dubious one of producing just another piece of foreign exotica for Westerners. It was also a considerable letdown for the bean-counters. But all this was quickly marginalized by an entertainment press that has succeeded in establishing a narrative of success as the conventional wisdom about how the venture fared. (Cultural sensation! Blockbuster! $240 million worldwide!) Entirely in line with its tendency to the most upbeat possible reading of the outcomes for identity politics-minded movies in the inverse of "Get woke, go broke" (recall, for example, how amid enthusiasm for woman-led action movies their talking up Mad Max: Fury Road had people thinking the middling performer and ultimately money-losing project was actually a colossal hit?), in the process not only confusing the remembrance of how one particular film performed commercially, but also affirming some unhealthy misapprehensions about such film projects and the portrayals of other cultures--not least the misapprehension that Hollywood as we know it does these things successfully. Thus did they pave the way for other disappointments of much greater financial consequence. (There was, for example, what Disney did with its live-action version of Mulan. There was what Disney-Marvel did with its Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.) A bunch of executives in C-suites in the more privileged enclaves of the Southland understand other countries? Their every word and deed shows that they don't even understand the metropolis, let alone the country, in which they have led their lives of profoundly undeserved privilege, even judged by the standard of how well they do what is generally recognized as being their jobs. After all, even with every year's box office reports driving home the lesson that if they want profits they had better study that market carefully and deliver movies about which the public will be enthusiastic enough to come to the theater they instead stick to their milking of tired franchises, brushing off the losses with references to "back catalog value" that smack of a foolhardy speculator's house of cards--not coincidentally, I think, given that foolhardy speculators are the ones calling the shots in Hollywood in this age of "shareholder value"-minded stupidities and "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley nitwittery.
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