Business & Finance Hollywood & CHINA

[Husky_Khan]

You know things are bad when Chinese newspapers are mocking how craven Hollywood is when it comes to wooing the Chinese market.

Though to be fair I think the South China Morning Post is actually an excellent newspaper. It's far from the state-run dreck that has been the source of much lolcowery on the internet.

The article discusses firstly the 2012 movie Red Dawn which is a remake of the awesome 80's film where the Soviet Union (with assists from Cuba and Nicaragua) invaded the United States. Here of course the film originally wanted China as the bad guys, but this was rapidly replaced by the North Koreans... provoking this witty quip from the article author.

“North Korea,” muses rebel teen Matt Eckert (played by Josh Peck) to his brother Jed (Chris Hemsworth) as they survey the forces invading their hometown of Spokane, Washington, in the 2012 action movie Red Dawn. “That doesn’t make sense.”

He’s right, of course, it doesn’t.

But look closer and you’ll realise we don’t even see Peck saying the line. It’s ADR (automated dialogue replacement), which means it was recorded after the fact to fill in gaps in the plot. And Red Dawn has enough of them to drive an entire fleet of tanks through – North Korean or otherwise.

The article actually explains some interesting bits. The studio back in 2009-10, MGM, was actually owned by a Hedge Fund which apparently didn't give a fuck what movies they made (as long as it had a reasonable return on investment overall I'm assuming) but when MGM faced financial troubles, Sony Pictures stepped up to distribute the film and thus by the time the film was released in 2012, the Chinese were crudely scrubbed out of the film and in a million dollars worth of reshoots, replaced with nefarious North Koreans (the Russians barely show up as well).

Sadly the movie (whose villains were mostly portrayed by Chinese-Americans lol) made barely over $50 million on a $65 million budget. And of course, much like the later Shang Chi, never released in China. Also, random trivia, remember that scene in Hong Kong from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight? Also added to market the film to China but alas, it never played in Chinese theaters either (though was still a success).

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3190918/bad-guys-changed-chinese-north-korean-red-dawn-remake

 

[Carrot of Truth]

Stumbled onto this fascinating video about how the Red Chinese communist scum uses tik tok to spread degeneracy and collect info.

 

[Sailor.X]

Stumbled onto this fascinating video about how the Red Chinese communist scum uses tik tok to spread degeneracy and collect info.

I have noticed if you delete Tik Tok off of your phone. When you do an update it shows back up and must be redeleted.

 

[Carrot of Truth]

I have noticed if you delete Tik Tok off of your phone. When you do an update it shows back up and must be redeleted.

I'm not surprised by that, I myself have never actually used tiktok.

 

[Husky_Khan]

So apparently this is a thing.

How the fuck did Barbie manage to get itself banned in Vietnam?

Bye bye 'Barbie': Vietnam bans new movie over South China Sea map

Vietnam has banned the upcoming "Barbie" movie from cinemas over scenes with a map showing China's claims to territory in the South China Sea, state media reported Monday.

www.france24.com

Okay... thank you.

Now tell me why the fuck there was a map of the South Chinese Sea showing China's Nine Dash Line ambitions fulfilled in a fucking Barbie movie?

What is more wild is that this has apparently happened in media repeatedly. Barbie is a Warner Brothers movie. But Netflix apparently had to remove episodes of the Australian political thriller Pine Gap for the same reasons. Not to be left out, another Warner Brothers film, Crazy Rich Asians apparently needed some scenes removed that showed a similar map. A similar map was apparently seen in Uncharted, Sony's adventure film based on the game franchise released last year.

And perhaps most surreal of all, the 2019 Universal/Dreamworks animated film Abominable co-produced with the Chinese Pearl Studio also was banned in Vietnam, as well as Malaysia and the Philippines for featuring a map showing the Nine-Dash Line of Chinese claims in the South China Sea and Universal courageously refused to remove or edit the scene, resulting in those countries banning the film outright.

Abominable film won't be screened in Malaysia over South China Sea map

KUALA LUMPUR: Animated film Abominable will not be shown in Malaysia after its distributor on Sunday (Oct 20) said it could not comply with ...

web.archive.org

 

[Bear Ribs]

Chinabux. In general, if you're going to show Asia one country or another is going to get offended over the map no matter what and most of them are ban-happy. China gets a lot of pandering from Hollywood because they have more citizens, and therefore are a larger potential market, than any of their neighbors.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Chinabux. In general, if you're going to show Asia one country or another is going to get offended over the map no matter what and most of them are ban-happy. China gets a lot of pandering from Hollywood because they have more citizens, and therefore are a larger potential market, than any of their neighbors.

I'm just wondering if including a Nine Dash Line is part of the contractual obligation to get your movie released in China so the studio can get their paltry 25% cut of the film profits or if it's like an Affirmative Action style college application and you have to check so many boxes to get the film released, one of them being you can show a nine dash line map of the South China Sea.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Hold up, lemme see what these maps look like.

Uncharted

Abominable

Pine Gap

]

And most obscene of all, Crazy Rich Asians

It's not even a nine dash line, its a handbag that shows islands in the South China Sea as under Chinese control. What a random choice of handbag?

It's like so easy to just not have a nine dash line map in your movie instead of going out of your way to include it.

https://www.esquiremag.ph/culture/movies-and-tv/nine-dash-line-in-movies-and-tv-hollywood-netflix-a00304-20220316-lfrm

 

[Bear Ribs]

I'm just wondering if including a Nine Dash Line is part of the contractual obligation to get your movie released in China so the studio can get their paltry 25% cut of the film profits or if it's like an Affirmative Action style college application and you have to check so many boxes to get the film released, one of them being you can show a nine dash line map of the South China Sea.

Not exactly but actually yes. Once you know what to look for you'll find Chinese products and pro-China messages all over Hollywood films. The thing is, China will only allow 34 foreign films per year inside their borders (and quite often not even that many make the cut). So even if a movie doesn't violate their rather byzantine censorship standards, if another movie happens to pander to China and yours is only non-offensive, they'll make the squeeze and your movie doesn't show anyway.

Further, China will remember your previous movies and if you don't have a history of pandering, or worse yet you published a movie that showed something they didn't like ten years ago, you may well be canceled forever even if your current movie is pure CCP propaganda. Even if you pander, if another company pandered harder you're out and they're in.

So it's not enough to just fail to offend, you have to throw heavily pro-China messages like the nine-dash line to ensure both current and future movies get on their tight list. This has had the effect over the years of forcing Hollywood companies into a brutal race to see who can pander the hardest and add the most China-friendly messages they can in order to stay on that limited list.

China's product placement in Hollywood movies - China.org.cn

When

www.china.org.cn

Despite Hollywood Appeasement To China, CCP Bans American Films

Film productions have been routinely tweaking scenes to make China favorable to them -- all for nothing.

www.newswars.com

Edit: Worth quoting this bit:

Some suspect the upcoming "Eternals" faces difficulty securing a release date because its director, Oscar-winning China native Chloe Zhao, was criticized for making an unflattering comment about her homeland during an interview several years ago. The announcement of her Oscar victory was blocked on the Chinese internet as well. It remains unclear if Chinese moviegoers will be able to watch "Eternals" this year. "If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about a strategy at this point that depended on access to the Chinese market and the good graces of Chinese film regulators," said Aynne Kokas, the author of "Hollywood Made in China" and a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "To make very expensive films in anticipation of being able to deliver them to the Chinese market and then not being certain that's possible is actually a much more financially irresponsible strategy from my perspective."

 

[Husky_Khan]

Well this is the most subtle Nine Dash Line yet.



Still looks pretty dashing if its pointed out though I guess.

 

[Sailor.X]

So apparently this is a thing.

How the fuck did Barbie manage to get itself banned in Vietnam?

Bye bye 'Barbie': Vietnam bans new movie over South China Sea map

Vietnam has banned the upcoming "Barbie" movie from cinemas over scenes with a map showing China's claims to territory in the South China Sea, state media reported Monday.

www.france24.com

Okay... thank you.

Now tell me why the fuck there was a map of the South Chinese Sea showing China's Nine Dash Line ambitions fulfilled in a fucking Barbie movie?

What is more wild is that this has apparently happened in media repeatedly. Barbie is a Warner Brothers movie. But Netflix apparently had to remove episodes of the Australian political thriller Pine Gap for the same reasons. Not to be left out, another Warner Brothers film, Crazy Rich Asians apparently needed some scenes removed that showed a similar map. A similar map was apparently seen in Uncharted, Sony's adventure film based on the game franchise released last year.

And perhaps most surreal of all, the 2019 Universal/Dreamworks animated film Abominable co-produced with the Chinese Pearl Studio also was banned in Vietnam, as well as Malaysia and the Philippines for featuring a map showing the Nine-Dash Line of Chinese claims in the South China Sea and Universal courageously refused to remove or edit the scene, resulting in those countries banning the film outright.

Abominable film won't be screened in Malaysia over South China Sea map

KUALA LUMPUR: Animated film Abominable will not be shown in Malaysia after its distributor on Sunday (Oct 20) said it could not comply with ...

web.archive.org

I think at some point Hollywood might just stop marketing movies in Asia. No matter what you do you're gonna piss of somebody. Kind of like how they have written the Middle East off as a whole pandering wise.