There's no free lunch: The Meg 2: The Trench Credit: Warner Bros
Of all the things about Greta Gerwig's Barbie that set people off mind, perhaps the most remarkable is the map. As the guileless heroine Margot Robbie prepares to travel from Barbie country to the «real world,» she turns to the «world map» scribbled on a drop-down diagram. After the film department of the Vietnamese government saw this scene, they immediately blocked the release of the film.
Why? Because, as the censors claimed, it showed that Barbie had sided with China in a longstanding territorial dispute. Among the decorative scribbles was a dotted line hanging from «Asia,» which they say is a «nine-dash line» circling the resource-rich part of the South China Sea that the Chinese Communist Party claims to own. official charts.
This maritime boundary was rejected in 2016 by a UN tribunal that sided with China's Southeast Asian neighbors. And Warner Bros insisted that the Barbie card was a «children's crayon drawing» with no political significance. So why would Vietnam imagine that a child's toy would side with an authoritarian state? Perhaps because Hollywood has long been accustomed to doing just that.
For example, in Sony's 2022 blockbuster Uncharted, an animated sequence of a plane flying over Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam clearly shows a nine-dash line delimiting the contested waters. The 2019 DreamWorks animated film Disgusting featured the same line on a map pinned to the wall. As for Barbie's guilt, the decision has not yet been made, since her entire map is covered with similar scribbles. Despite this, the film is still banned in Vietnam and the frame is blurry in the Philippines.
Why American studios tacitly support the imperialist plans of a foreign power is the dirtiest secret of the cinema of the 21st century. Gradually since the late 1990s, and then much more dramatically since 2018, mainstream films have been made with one audience in mind: the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP. This organization holds the keys to the Chinese box office, where hundreds of millions of potential new customers are waiting, and a blockbuster can raise up to $100 million at almost no additional cost. But to gain access to this lucrative market, the film must first appeal to China's censors, like the rest of his studio's output. What's in it for Hollywood, if everything goes in their favor, is free money. And for China? The guiding hand in American films: the most effective propaganda tool ever created.
Problem drawing: Barbie and ' ;nine-dotted line' card Credit: Warner Bros
Throughout the 20th century, cinema sold America to the world: it was the funniest, hottest, most exciting and glamorous place on the planet. And as the 21st century approached, the CCP realized that it could be used to its advantage. “Chinese money has started flowing into the industry,” one producer with a wealth of Hollywood experience tells me anonymously, “all with the promise that more money could be made in this brand new, movie-crazed market.” (By the mid-2010s, it was clear that the Chinese box office would soon eclipse even the American box office, and in 2020 it finally happened.)
This strategy is at its least sophisticated in official Chinese-US collaborations, such as the 2018 shark-monster thriller The Meg and its sequel, The Meg 2: The Trench, which hits theaters this weekend. At first glance, they look like standard summer food: in Meg's case, it's a deep-sea adventure that sees Jason Statham battling giant CGI monsters. But then you begin to notice an unusual choice: Chinese counterparts, almost unknown abroad, play consistently patriotic and resourceful heroes; Places like Hainan's first Meg Sanya Bay Resort look like clumsy local stand-ins for a more overtly cinematic setting.
«It becomes an uncomfortable mixture of flattery and ideology,» the producer explains. «And, of course, all the pro-Chinese messages that you include for the benefit of the CCP censors will then also be seen and absorbed by all other viewers around the world who watch them.»
Exactly what the Central Propaganda Office will and will not allow in the films is unclear as they have never released a definitive list. Almost nothing is actually recorded: «Working with them is 99 percent guesswork,» explains another producer. However, some general rules are clear: openly gay characters, nudity, drug use, graphic violence, and occult or spiritual themes are frowned upon, and defamation of China is strictly prohibited. “Some of them you will get away with in films that you never dreamed of presenting to the CCP,” they continue. «But an anti-Chinese topic anywhere can ruin your list.»
Everyone remembers with shudder the year 1997, when Disney, Sony and MGM released mid-budget films with outright criticism of China: Martin Scorsese's Kundun, about the young Dalai -lame; «Seven Years in Tibet» with Brad Pitt; and Red Corner, a miscarriage thriller starring Richard Gere, himself an active Tibetan independence activist.
No one felt threatened because the Chinese market for foreign films at the time was tiny, about the same as in Peru. But the country's economic power was significant, and when the CCP got wind of the films, a brief statement was made: «In order to protect China's overall national interests, it has been decided that all business cooperation with these three companies will be suspended without exception.»
That's the whole collaboration: from what was then the world's seventh largest economy, a widespread freeze. Sony immediately launched a frantic diplomatic campaign, while then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner flew out to issue a humiliating apology in person. After a few months, the hostility thawed, business resumed, and Hollywood learned its lesson.
“Today you just couldn’t make any of those films,” says the first producer. “No one will touch them. And it doesn't matter if you wanted to release them in China or not. The studios are all owned by conglomerates, and China, now the world's second largest economy after the US, is a client none of them can afford to lose.
The memory erasing device that was erased: the neurolyzer in Men in Black 3. Image Credit & Copyright: Sony
The Red Dawn remake is, as Producer Number Two describes (with obvious shudder), «the last career-ruining cautionary tale.» Whereas in the original 1984 the United States was invaded by the international communist alliance, in this 2009 update, China was presented as the aggressor. (For one, it was the only country that could pull it off.) But since 1997 is still fresh in their minds, no distributor comes close.
So, for seven figures, the studio hired a visual effects company to watch the movie frame by frame and turn every piece of Chinese iconography—every last flag, poster, and badge—into their North Korean equivalents. A new prologue was put together and new lines of dialogue were dubbed, including, memorablely, from tough quarterback Josh Peck: “North Korea? It doesn't make any sense.»
Still no one will buy it. In 2011, it was purchased by a now defunct independent distributor, and in 2012 it was finally released in a finished, CCP-pacifying form. Due to the changes, Red Dawn was a commercial failure and received terrible reviews. The second producer explains, «All this chaos unfolded without China having to say a single word.»
For a while, studios could present a specific «Chinese version» to Chinese audiences with impunity, with adjustments that ranged from radical to amusingly shallow. Skyfall (2012) cut out the scene in which the Chinese guard was shot (and thus it is clear that he did not do his job). Mission: Impossible III (2006) lost footage of clotheslines in downtown Shanghai, apparently because they made the city look backwards. Passengers (2016) got a glimpse of Chris Pratt's booty. Harry Potter's gifts were described in dubbed dialogue as being superhuman in origin rather than occult. Somehow, in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), which was tame to begin with, three minutes of homosexual behavior was discovered and promptly cut. The darkest and funniest of all was the complete removal of the neurolyzer, the memory-wiping device, from Men in Black 3 (2012). Why allow the possibility that a government agency would want to erase historical records?
However, there was fury when it was revealed that Marvel Studios — the main beneficiary of the box office in China until at least 2020 — cut a scene from the ubiquitous version of Iron Man 3 (2013) in which an injured Robert Downey Jr. China, partly through acupuncture. After that, a new condition appeared: the cut had to be a cut in Chinese.
Transformers: Age of Extinction Hong Kong Finale Credit: Paramount
Some filmmakers were vocal about the new mandate. Michael Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) featured a smart and handsome Chinese factory owner (who is unavoidably a kung fu master), and the Chinese military saved the day during the final in Hong Kong. (Transformer movies thrive in China because audiences there grew up with the original cartoons; the same is clearly not the case with Star Wars, whose new versions consistently fail.) Others gestured more subtly. Have you ever noticed the nationality of the general who saves the day at the end of Arrival (2016)? Or a bit of Mandarin dialogue in Dune (2021)? In the movie Gravity (2013), which country produced the capsule that brought Sandra Bullock safely to Earth?
Although some stood firm. Christopher Nolan was advised to cut the Chinese mafia accountant plot from The Dark Knight (2008), but declined. (As a result, the film was never released there.) Similarly, Quentin Tarantino refused to touch the frame of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), which was also subsequently put on hold; seven years ago, he had a nightmarish experience with Django Unchained, which was retracted a week later when the wife of a CCP official told her husband that during the barn torture scene, she could have sworn she saw Jamie Foxx, um, Django, uninhibited.
Perhaps, over time, they would have refused to retreat more — but the terrain has changed again. Over the past decade, China has assiduously developed its own film industry in the most raw Hollywood style of the 1980s. And today he makes many of his own politically relevant (and often sharply nationalistic) films, from romantic comedies to blockbusters.
Production ramped up in the mid-2010s — and, according to the producer, really began to pay dividends during the pandemic, when geopolitical tensions created a new suspicion of everything Western, not only in the CCP, but in the country as a whole.
“So while far fewer of our films are now being censored, the few that are, no one wants to watch. We're not quite back to the Peruvian numbers yet, but they're getting close.» This summer was a notable flop, with the latest Mission: Impossible flopping, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Doom and The Little Mermaid flopping outright, taking in just a few million dollars each.
Treading water: Meg 2. Credit & Copyright: Warner Bros
Both sides are still adjusting to the wary new climate. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was originally funded in part by Chinese tech and cultural conglomerate Tencent, but after an internal panic about funding a film that made the US military look so unspeakably cool, the money was withdrawn and the film blocked. Chinese release. Meanwhile in Washington, mood music is turning against Hollywood's worship of China. Passed in December, the National Defense Authorization Act prohibits films that require the approval of Chinese censors from receiving any funding from the US own military-industrial complex. (The US Department of Defense funds and advises on blockbusters quite frequently: recent beneficiaries include several Marvel and Transformers films, and of course Top Gun: Maverick.)
Joe and Anthony Russo, siblings who directed the last two Avengers films, opened their own studio in Beijing in 2016 and worked as consultants on Wolf Warrior 2 — about the heroic exploits of a Chinese super soldier in an unnamed African country — which took an incredible amount of time to complete. $854. million in China in 2017. (Currently, its star, Wu Jing, can be seen starring alongside Jason Statham in The Meg 2.) However, the Russos haven't heard much about the venture since its launch, and their names don't appear in Wolf. Warrior 2 official credits.
Does this mean Hollywood is no longer fawning over the CCP? “The view of China as an endless hose of money is almost dead,” says the first producer. “But since the parent companies still have so many business interests, we have to do our best. We still can't do 'Seven Years' in Tibet.”
However, China is also treading water. “The simple truth is that the version of China that China sells in its films is nowhere near as attractive as the visions of American Hollywood that were sold from the 1930s to the 1990s,” says the second producer. «The international market for watching courageous Chinese soldiers gunning down Americans for three hours is currently not huge.»
If the West does not teach you to enjoy these things, the studios and the PDA may reach a dead end. It is clear that there will be no more Chinese money for Hollywood. But also — aside from the threat of sanctions for outspoken criticism (which is suspected to stay here) — perhaps no more direct intervention. A Hollywood blockbuster may still be consumed by a shoal of Meg-like monsters, but it can still escape their jaws.
The Meg 2: The Trench is in theaters
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