What Might Hollywood Rapprochement with China Mean for Movies?

In a prior post I remarked Zootopia 2's remarkable gross in China--a reflection not just of the movie's genuine appeal to Chinese audiences, with which the first Zootopia really was a hit, but of the Chinese government's willingness to afford the release the opportunity for a gross such as no American movie in China has even come close to since Avengers: Endgame way back before the pandemic. I also suggested that this is not likely to be an isolated event, that a Hollywood facing sharply contracted theatrical attendance in America and elsewhere internationally is taking a renewed interest in the potentials of the Chinese market.

Of course, that said one may wonder just what effect all this might have on Hollywood's filmmaking. My guess is that it will not be very great, given how Hollywood made use of its opportunities before. Hollywood did well screening in China what it has to offer that China just so happens to want--as was the case with the Fast & Furious franchise, many a big animated family film, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe--and seems to have done less well when actually understanding the Chinse market in a deeper way than "That made a lot of money in China, maybe enough to count as a point in favor of a sequel." One sees this in a number of films that, if made for American audiences first and foremost, were thought likely to play well in China because of their particular casting and themes. That thinking consistently showed that they failed to understand that American identity politics are quite irrelevant to China--that for example the story of Mulan is for the Chinese a story about filial piety, not feminist exultation in woman assuming the traditionally ultra-masculine role of warrior (all as one could fill a warehouse with the easy mistakes that they made with the details of the story that meant a lot to a Chinese audience more familiar with the original story). Those who made "This will be a hit in China!" claims for such movies failed, too, to understand not only what really appeals to Chinese audiences, but what offends them, for instance that their casting for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings looked to at least some Chinese as a deliberate use of (to them) unattractive actors smacking of racist, perhaps deliberately insulting, Western stereotyping or even caricaturing of East Asian looks--all as, of course, Shang-Chi is a derivative of perhaps the most notorious of racist "Yellow Peril" fiction of all time, Sax Rohmer's Sir Denis Nayland Smith novels featuring Chinese supervillain Fu-Manchu, a figure Rohmer demonized specifically because he is a Chinese opponent of Western imperialism (guess how that plays in a China where the ruling party's fight against that imperialism is a source of not just political legitimacy but national pride!) even as the producers applauded themselves for their "wokeness" in making that movie, with the entertainment press clapping along. (At this rate they might make a historical epic about the Opium Wars lionizing the British assault on the country--glorifying what by the '90s even a James Bond novel had to acknowledge as a crime--and think themselves progressive for casting so many Asian actors in a movie!) And of course, the high hopes that Hollywood and its courtiers in the media held for Crazy Rich Asians as a moneymaker in Asia is a veritable monument to Hollywood's cluelessness all the way down the line (my remarks about which ran so long that I eventually decided to give them their own post rather than unbalance this one).

Really, the level of incompetence bespeaking stupidity was astonishing. And today I have no expectation that Hollywood, which has in the wake of the pandemic's shock to their business shown itself profoundly inflexible in all those ways boding ill for Hollywood doing better with specific appeals to Chinese audiences, will make much effort to do so. After all, in a time in which it seems that the path to profitability increasingly lies notthrough filling the market with tentpoles but targeting one's movies carefully, Hollywood is showing itself reluctant to pursue the targeted strategy with American filmgoers (horror fans apart), never mind foreign ones. The result is that I expect Hollywood will emphasize not blowing its chance to make money in China with those American movies that Chinese theatergoers genuinely want to see rather than fantasizing that American movies playing to American preoccupations will somehow connect with Chinese filmgoers just because, for example, they happen to have Asian-American actors in them--though admittedly even that may be overestimating the people who run Tinseltown.