Red Carpet, page 21
“Captain America is not just a superhero, but also represents the spirit of freedom and democracy that the United States has always promoted,” he said. “My love for him is also in line with my fantasy of liberalism.”
Marvel superhero movies are the most global films made today, the only franchise able to draw audiences from every country every time. But as Zhou’s interpretation of the movies and their characters shows, they remain inherently American narratives, not only in their characters but in the themes of individualism, triumphalism, and personal freedom they explore. It’s just that Iron Man gets operated on by Chinese doctors sometimes, and even Captain America uses a Chinese-made Vivo phone. In the case of Captain America and his biggest Chinese fan, the movies convey the Western good in ways that would likely concern Chinese officials who want the box-office grosses these blockbusters provide but chafe at the Western values they promote.
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If Marvel is the Hollywood cinematic universe with the best timing in China, then Star Wars is the one with the worst. Much like the approach taken by the live-action remakes of 1990s animated classics, Disney’s Star Wars strategy trades heavily on nostalgia for the original trilogy, which premiered in 1977. After buying Lucasfilm, Disney began planning a trio of films that would combine new actors with Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, alongside other props and characters made famous by George Lucas’s first installment. The first movie in the new series, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, introduced new characters like Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Poe (Oscar Isaac). Like Transformers before it, Star Wars would hit at the box office by drawing in several generations.
With a price tag of more than $250 million, Disney wanted The Force Awakens to win over fans in China to the franchise—especially since it would be one of several Star Wars movies coming in the next decade. They had a Chinese-Korean boy band make a music video for a song called “Lightsaber.” They had five hundred miniature storm troopers stand in formation on the Great Wall, their iconic white helmets a modern addition to the 2,700-year-old structure. Director J. J. Abrams traveled with the movie’s stars and new droid, a Creamsicle-colored roller ball called BB-8, for a premiere in Shanghai.
Ahead of the movie’s release, though, most publicity Disney could generate was unwelcome. The studio had radically changed the makeup of its Star Wars cast, introducing black, Asian, and other ethnicities to what had been a largely white space force. The changes earned praise in the U.S., where a conversation about on-screen representation had pressured studios to make sure their movies reflected the countries watching them. The Force Awakens included a black actor from the United Kingdom, John Boyega, as a renegade storm trooper named Finn, alongside Latino actor Oscar Isaac as Poe. Disney released an overstuffed poster showing these new actors alongside the 1970s players.
When the poster appeared in China, however, local executives in Disney’s Beijing office had made some conspicuous changes. Anticipating local pushback against actors of color, they shrank Boyega’s image on the poster so that he was about as prominent as BB-8, the droid. Chewbacca, the dark-haired Wookiee, also got reduced billing, and Isaac disappeared altogether. The controversy exposed a sensitive topic in Hollywood circles, where some executives believe Chinese audiences are less receptive to lead actors of color than American ones are. In China, where many residents may have never seen a black person in their everyday life, the unfamiliarity can read as racism—or at least give executives another risk to avoid. Disney’s office in Beijing confirmed these fears, unfounded or not, when it tried to trick audiences into thinking they would be seeing a movie with largely white stars.
When The Force Awakens opened in the U.S., it sold out theaters around the clock and went on to gross more than $900 million, a new record. Yet in China, the movie petered out fast, eventually grossing just $124 million, when Disney accountants had projected $200 million. The biggest franchise in Hollywood wasn’t appealing to the industry’s most important foreign market.
Lucasfilm sent longtime executive Howard Roffman to China to figure out why. It wasn’t a poster fracas that was keeping audiences away. Roffman started interviewing fans and nonfans across China, soon discovering that the generational appeal of Star Wars in the West had no analogue in China, which was only a year out from the Cultural Revolution when the original movie premiered in 1977. Those going to the new movie in theaters around the world were revisiting their childhood and introducing their children to it. Without a drive to shepherd children into the saga, the movies needed to have stand-alone appeal. And in that respect, Chinese audiences felt left out. Lucasfilm had incorporated in-jokes and callbacks to the thirty-eight-year-old film, and without that base knowledge—the Death Star, Yoda, “I am your father”—dialogue that caused American fans to go into paroxysms of bliss just confused Chinese viewers. When Harrison Ford’s Han Solo first returns to the Millennium Falcon and says, “Chewie, we’re home,” moviegoers in China thought he might live there with the giant ape. The disparity in appeal lays bare a critical vulnerability in Hollywood’s reliance on mining studio libraries for inspiration. Chinese moviegoers had caught up on a lot of entertainment they’d missed before the theater count began to grow, but this new approach in Hollywood of leaning on nostalgia revealed what blind spots persisted.
Roffman’s second discovery, however, had more to do with the new China than the old Star Wars. China in 2015 looked a lot more advanced than this supposed future on-screen. When moviegoers noticed Han Solo piloted the Millennium Falcon with button controls, it looked less sophisticated than anything available on the smartphone in their pocket. The future was supposed to be a place of holograms and virtual reality, they said. Who pushes buttons?
“It’s this very gritty, dirty, shopworn thing, and in the West it got great praise for looking like a lived-in universe,” Roffman said. “But in China it was like, ‘Ew, why would anybody want to live there?’ The Jedi knights wear monk robes; the planets look like junkyards.”
Disney did not give up. For the studio’s next Star Wars feature, a spin-off called Rogue One, the company went the flower vase route, casting two Chinese actors in supporting roles. Donnie Yen, a well-known kung fu actor, had an idea to make his character blind, a deft combination of the Chinese blind swordsman trope and Lucas mythology that elevated the part. But his Chinese costar, Jiang Wen, didn’t help matters when he admitted, days before the movie’s premiere, that he had never seen a Star Wars film. “I know nothing about them,” he said. Rogue One disappointed by grossing a tepid $69 million in China.
Disney then tried seeding the Star Wars mythology among young Chinese children, publishing a line of manga comics on the Skywalker saga. Those failed to develop a critical following. The new movies’ grosses kept falling. Star Wars: The Last Jedi collected $42 million. Lucasfilm executives wondered if they should make a spin-off movie based in China in an all-out effort to win over consumers. It went nowhere. The last of the new trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, made only $20 million in China—or about as much as it had made in Spain.
Instead, a different story of resistance appeared to Chinese audiences the weekend The Rise of Skywalker premiered and collected nearly six times its gross—a financial symbol of Chinese tastes deviating from Hollywood offerings and toward their own stories. It was the fourth installment of the Ip Man movies, a series about a real-life Chinese martial arts master best known for training Bruce Lee. Playing Master Ip was Donnie Yen, the Chinese actor who had been cast in Rogue One to pull in Chinese audiences. In this film, Master Ip arrives in 1960s San Francisco, a city teeming with suburban mothers, city cops, and drill sergeants united in their hatred of the Chinese. A young Chinese girl is attacked by a pretty blond cheerleader and her pack of jock protectors. They cut off her hair and declare, “In America, people like you follow and don’t lead.”
In the climax of the film, a racist marine declares the U.S. the best country in the world—“a land of supremacy”—and challenges the Ip Man to a fight, karate versus kung fu. “You’re nothing but another yellow chink,” he tells Master Ip, standing underneath the U.S. Marine Corps flag. The American villain is a stand-in not unlike the Russian antagonists of 1980s American movies. The fight goes as expected—one man up, one man down, then reverse—until Master Ip lands a solid punch that bloodies the marine’s right eye, kicks him in the groin, snaps his right arm, and, in classic kung fu fashion, delivers a punishing three-finger jab to a pressure point in his neck that sends the marine to the ground and then to the infirmary. The group of marine soldiers watching start to applaud. Black soldiers, Asian American soldiers, white soldiers—all of them cheer for the Chinese hero. Before the credits roll, text on the screen tells the viewer the U.S. Marine Corps has incorporated kung fu fighting into its training program since 2001. The entire movie becomes an origin story for an American reliance on the Chinese. When the lights came up in the theater, I asked my Chinese guest what he thought of it. He told me he was close to crying. Even as moviegoers like Zhou flocked to Captain America, some others in China didn’t want to see Donnie Yen helping the rebels win in Star Wars. Judging by my guest’s reaction, this was the movie China wanted to see Donnie Yen in.
Soon after the fizzle of Rise of Skywalker, though, Lucasfilm announced it wasn’t giving up yet. In late 2020, it began publishing Star Wars web novels, a popular form of online literature released in installments and shaped in real time by audience feedback. The first release, The Vow of Silver Dawn, takes place two hundred years before the Skywalker saga and is populated by Wookiees and humans who stew their meat in soy sauce and go by names like Zhang San. This was in addition to the forty preexisting Star Wars novels that Disney was translating into Chinese to try to bring the Chinese up to speed. With more than a dozen TV shows and movies planned for the next several years of Star Wars, the company could not afford to give up hope that China would come on board.
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With Tang and his neighbors out of their homes, migrant workers traveled across the country to fill the construction jobs needed to build a Tomorrowland, a Fantasyland, a Toy Story Land, an Adventure Isle, a Treasure Cove, Gardens of Imagination, and Mickey Avenue (as opposed to the Main Street, U.S.A., found at most other Disney parks). Ahead of its opening, some officials raised alarms about Disney’s corrupting influence that echoed those Mao-era concerns about Western art infecting Chinese brains.
“I suggest that we shouldn’t allow too many Disneyland theme parks to be built. . . . If children follow Western culture when they are little, they will end up liking Western culture when they grow up and be uninterested in Chinese culture,” said Li Xiusong, China’s deputy head of culture.
But the forces in Li’s government that wanted a Disney park in their country won out. In June 2016, Iger and his deputies traveled to China for the opening of Shanghai Disney Resort, a $5.5 billion attraction covering those one thousand acres, with room to grow beyond the theme park, two themed hotels, dining and entertainment district, and nature park that opened the attraction. A subway station was built just to ferry guests to its gates. Iger hosted journalists on walks through the park and promised it would be “authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese.” In the first days of its opening, some growing pains emerged. Chinese patrons weren’t accustomed to lining up for rides the way Western visitors were, and they had little understanding of how “dark rides,” or coasters built indoors, operated. But for the most part, the opening of Disney’s new outpost in mainland China had gone as preordained.
I visited Shanghai Disneyland in the summer of 2019, riding the subway out to the park on a weekday. The landscape visible through the train’s window grew increasingly desolate as we rode out of Shanghai, the Magic Kingdom castle blurry in the distance through expansive fields, greenhouses, and endless power lines. Three stops before our arrival, two men got on board to sell counterfeit Mickey Mouse ears out of a plastic bag. As the train grew closer to the park, unruly greenery gave way to Disney order: clipped bushes and hedges that make the Shanghai subway start to feel like a theme-park tram. The Shanghai Disneyland subway stop had been completely taken over. Silhouettes of Goofy and Donald Duck struck jaunty poses on the wall, and primary colors had replaced the palate of gray and off-white that the other stations have. Baby-blue stars hung above the security guards scanning bags and the facial recognition cameras that log visitors on their way out of every train station.
In the years since opening, annual attendance at Shanghai Disneyland has hovered around eleven million visitors, enough to place it in the top ten theme parks by attendance anywhere in the world. (It still trails attendance at Disney’s parks in the U.S. and Tokyo.) The experience of the Chinese park wasn’t much different from visiting an American one. Tickets cost about $58, or about half the price of a ticket to Disneyland, but that’s considered overpriced by most Chinese parents. Soon after the opening, visitors, like their American counterparts, complained that food prices were inflated—a steamed bun that cost 20 cents on the street was $1 inside the park gates.
On my visit, an orchestral arrangement of “Go the Distance” from Hercules played outside merchandise stores selling Disney enamel pins and Disney coffee mugs. Fake storefronts were interspersed among the real ones, including B.B. Wolfe & Co. Demolition, a riff on the Three Little Pigs rhyme. Its slogan: “We’ll blow your house down.” A Chinese worker at the front door of a restaurant waved goodbye wearing a giant Mickey Mouse glove on her left hand, making it appear as though she suffered from a brand-specific version of elephantiasis. I walked through a sea of bubbles being dispersed by an Iron Man claw worn by a young boy also wearing a Donald Duck canteen and a Pirates of the Caribbean eye patch. His mom was in mouse ears.
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Today, Tang and his wife live in a cluster of thirty high-rise apartment buildings reached by a fifteen-minute car ride from Disneyland. Four such communities, totaling about 6,500 apartments, were built for the Zhaohang village families. Tang lives on the second floor of a sand-colored high-rise, one of several identical structures. The area has the feel of a retirement village at certain parts of the day. In the mornings, Tang takes a walk on a two-lane asphalt road lined with camphor trees. There’s a playground that fills in the evenings and an on-site kindergarten for the children of the relocated families. After dinner, Tang dresses in gray pants and a striped shirt to smoke and catch up with old Zhaohang neighbors downstairs.
Many of the families have realized considerable wealth thanks to the relocation. Since they lived in multigenerational housing on their farmland, they qualified for multiple apartments in the new buildings, many of which they did not need. Several families rented out those additional units, collecting monthly rent far beyond their old farming income. The gas stoves took getting used to—some residents say the old clay and iron pots of Zhaohang made better food.
For his part, Tang is happy in his new home. It doesn’t leak when it rains, as his old place did.
“I think being a farmer was my hardest time ever,” he said. “Now I’m old, but it’s also the age when I can enjoy my life.”
He and his wife have been to Disneyland three or four times—he can’t remember the exact count. He thought it was fantastic. It struck him as particularly good for tourists who come to China or Shanghai and want an unparalleled experience. But all in all, he thought the tickets and food were too expensive. He does not feel the need to go back.
eleven
Hollywood’s Translators
The 1995 movie Cutthroat Island, about buried treasure and sword fights on the high seas, was cursed from the start. Michael Douglas quit the lead role eight weeks before filming. The shoot dragged over schedule by months. A writer parachuted in for a $100,000 last-minute script rewrite. The crew got food poisoning.
Then audiences actually saw it. pirate movie’s so bad, it should cut its own throat, went one representative headline. A $10 million gross on a $100 million budget earned the movie an unwelcome distinction: a Guinness World Record for the biggest flop of all time.
Renny Harlin, the director of Cutthroat Island, found it hard to recover. The biggest movie of his career became industry shorthand for “colossal bomb,” an unmitigated mistake of the 1990s alongside Beanie Babies and Y2K anxiety. The life Harlin had constructed up until that point—the car (Ferrari), the house ($9 million), the movie-star wife (Geena Davis)—disintegrated. People averted their eyes when they saw him at restaurants.
Cutthroat Island had been Harlin’s seventh movie after a decade-long career specializing in proudly mainstream entertainment: Die Hard 2, starring a bloodied Bruce Willis saving the day; Cliffhanger, with a brawny Sylvester Stallone doing the same. The chances of getting work like that again evaporated, but jobs still came in sporadically. In 1999 a B movie about hyperintelligent sharks chasing LL Cool J called Deep Blue Sea. Seven years after that, The Covenant, about four male witches with flip phones. A remake of The Exorcist that no one wanted. A 2014 Hercules movie that opened the same year as another Hercules movie, that one starring Dwayne Johnson. Harlin’s starred Kellan Lutz, the sixth-billed star of Twilight, and the box-office tallies correlated accordingly.
It was a few months after The Legend of Hercules bombed that Chinese producers halfway around the world started hunting for a Hollywood director who could come to their country and make a movie. Someone who could lend the production some Hollywood flair, maybe teach them a thing or two along the way about moviemaking. Harlin was just the guy for the job.
