Tom Cruise is once again a “Top Gun” at the international box office this summer thanks to his appearance in Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the hit 1986 film. Despite being delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the film had already crossed the $1 billion market in ticket sales last month, and has shown little signs of slowing down.
While hundreds of millions of people around the world have seen Cruise back in action, and even in the cockpit of a Boeing F/A-18, some billion or so may never get to see the film – at least not at the box office. Fans in China will have to wait instead for bootleg DVDs/Blu-rays to hit the market in the People’s Republic of China.
One reason is that Tencent, the major Chinese investor in the film, had pulled out due to reported concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wouldn’t support the film’s framing of the U.S. military in such a positive light. The tensions were tied to an early trailer of the film, which was first released in 2019, and showed Tom Cruise’s character wearing a flight jacket without flag patches of Japan and Taiwan. At the time, critics called out the production for bowing to the Chinese government in Beijing, which doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan as an independent nation.
Any film that is publicly screened in China needs a permit from regulators, and films can get banned for a number of reasons. In fact, it was even reported that this year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home was banned for being too patriotic.
In recent years, Hollywood has worked to appease the CCP’s censors, but the times are changing.
Hollywood Isn’t Bending to China Anymore
Increasingly, however, it appears that Hollywood has seen that it can live without what has become the second largest box office in the world. After Tencent backed out of its investment of Top Gun: Maverick, and a mainland Chinese release of the film seemed unlikely, Paramount Pictures reinstated the Taiwanese and Japanese flags onto Cruise’s flight jacket.
Paramount isn’t alone in opting to stick to its (Top) guns. Disney also declined to make an edit to its Lightyear, and the movie’s producer Galyn Susman told Reuters she expected the film wouldn’t open in China.
This is a major shift for Hollywood, which in some cases went to almost absurd lengths to appease the CCP. The most famous case was the 2012 remake of the 1984 film Red Dawn, which even saw the “villainous” invader of the United States changed from China to North Korea. MGM reportedly spent $1 million to make that edit.
Such changes might no longer happen.
“There are two reasons,” explained Matthew J. Schmidt, Ph.D., associate professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven.
“First, Hollywood is scared about turning off U.S. and European audiences, which because of the Internet now know more about China’s genocide of the Uyghur people,” Schmidt told ClearanceJobs. “The optics are terrible for Hollywood. They also risk sanctions from the U.S. government, which had passed legislation that signals there could be future sanctions. All this impacts the domestic market for releases, which is still the key market, especially as China is actually contracting.”
Some in Tinseltown may be willing to pass on the Chinese cash cow for more personal reasons.
“Hollywood, believe it or not, may care enough about the genocide to act out of principle,” Schmidt continued. “This is an industry that produced Schindler’s List, after all. While a lot of studios have chased the Chinese money train, there have always been voices in the industry that have been critical. They’re finally being heard.”
The Chinese Domestic Film Industry
There could be a final consideration, and that is that China’s domestic film industry is already becoming a powerhouse that Hollywood may not bother competing with. Chinese-made films were already doing strong international business prior to the pandemic, but then when movie theaters were largely shuttered in much of the world; a few Chinese films took off like gangbusters.
Last October, a Chinese film did what no James Bond villain had been able to do, defeat 007, while it wasn’t Daniel Craig or Chris Pratt who proved to be the biggest action star. Rather it was Chinese actors Wu Jing and Jackson Yee who starred in the Chinese-made Korean War epic The Battle of Lake Changjin. It went on to become the second highest grossing film at the worldwide box office for 2021, earning $913 million, and set the record for the highest grossing Chinese film of all time.
What is quite notable about The Battle of Lake Changjin is that this is the first time Chinese filmmakers have really tackled the subject matter and highlighted their country’s role in the Korean War – while it also showed the U.S. as the enemy, one it defeated. The movie depicts Chinese soldiers heroically facing United Nations forces, including those of the United States and South Korea, at the Chosin Reservoir in late 1950. The film presents the Chinese forces overcoming significant odds to defeat the Americans.
The Battle of Lake Changjin came just a year after China scored a similar feat with the equally epic World War II story The Eight Hundred, which was also notable in that it depicted a story of the holdout of a force of National Chinese soldiers in Shanghai in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
That film had been controversial even before it went into production for focusing on the National forces, which had fought against the CCP in the Chinese Civil War. Eventually. it was determined the story’s “Alamo-esque” last stand was about the Chinese people regardless of their politics. The fact that it depicted the Japanese as a savage enemy and the west as indifferent clearly resonated with Beijing. The Eight Hundred was the second-highest grossing film of 2020, and even outperformed Disney’s Mulan in the Chinese market.
Given that China is now increasingly releasing such tentpole films that compete with foreign releases from Hollywood, it seems that the American film industry has seen that if it is going to lose the fight, maybe it won’t try so hard to appease the CCP’s censors. That would be a true Hollywood ending.
