Red Carpet, page 25
In the decade after he’d quit the Beijing Olympics, Steven Spielberg’s career oscillated between the popcorn entertainment he’d started with, like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the highbrow films he’d graduated to, like Lincoln. After raising $800 million in equity and debt with a trio of investors, he restarted his company as Amblin Partners. The new Amblin identified a need that its 1980s iteration hadn’t had to address. Spielberg’s new backers left a stake in the company for a Chinese partner that could ensure that their movies got a piece of the country’s box office. Spielberg’s reputation after the Olympics controversy hadn’t taken a hit, and other studios had demonstrated the power of partnering directly with a Chinese business in the years since Rob Moore’s contract-signing spree on Transformers. After the catchall approach that Wanda had taken, a smarter strategy emerged: targeted one-off deals between studios and Chinese partners operating in their government’s good graces. These were not the joint ventures required to do business in China by the bureaucrats in Beijing but rather a way for Hollywood to navigate the challenges of new competition and discerning audiences.
The new backers came from the country’s booming internet industry, all massive conglomerates that made Google look quaint by comparison: Baidu Inc., a search engine; Alibaba Group, an e-commerce platform; and Tencent, the owner of social media giant WeChat. Collectively called the BATs, they ruled China’s internet, which had largely skipped the home-computer stage and gone straight to smartphones used to hail cabs, order food, and pay for just about everything. When I’d travel to Shanghai and try to use cash instead of a smartphone at the register, cashiers looked at me like I was a time traveler. Even homeless people were known to seek donations by holding up signs bearing a QR code passersby could scan to send a few bucks over.
The biggest of these companies was Alibaba, which was responsible for a majority of online purchases in the world’s most populous country. Its founder, Jack Ma, replaced Wang Jianlin as China’s wealthiest man in 2017—as much a symbolic changing of the guard as a monetary one, since Wang had made his fortune in physical retail and Ma had made his by taking it online. His company’s mission was to promote “health and happiness,” said Ma, who, like Wang, had his quirks. He wanted Alibaba to exist in three Chinese centuries, which would require staying in business for 102 years. Every year, 102 couples gather at the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou for a collective wedding ceremony marking the goal, not far from three twenty-foot-tall statues of frail naked men that anchor the campus. Ma installed the men, all standing fully exposed with their heads down and their shoulders slumped, to remind workers to stay humble despite their success.
Ma’s love of movies led Alibaba to diversify into entertainment, as stateside tech firms like Amazon and Apple were doing. For Ma, it was a chance to yet again spread health and happiness across his country. His favorite movie, he often said, was Forrest Gump, the quintessential example of an American director offering a glossed treatment of American history. Alibaba Pictures formed in 2014 to bring similar kinds of feel-good stories to China. Ma dispatched a deputy to Los Angeles to find them.
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Wei Zhang was born in Beijing in the early 1970s, just as the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end. Wei grew up on the campus where her father was a professor, allowing her access to foreign movies that didn’t play in regular theaters. Some nights, she and her parents took stools and sat for outdoor screenings projected onto a hanging sheet.
“That state had its own beauty. Everyone was equal,” she said. “Everything was simple.” In school, teachers spoke with awe of the year 2000, when Deng Xiaoping had vowed China would realize its Four Modernizations, or four pillars of the Chinese economy: agriculture, technology, industry, and defense. In 1990, Wei moved to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to attend Seton Hill, a small Catholic school located in a tiny exurb of Pittsburgh. Her parents, who made about $50 a month, had sent her with $1,000. She bought a used car and learned how to drive on the Pennsylvania highway, going to work at a local Chinese restaurant or shop at the nearby Westmoreland Mall. The tractor-trailers crossing the state terrified her, looking unlike any kind of vehicle found in 1980s China. When she first returned home after leaving for college, her dad told her he hoped to one day afford a three-wheel moped.
After attending Seton Hill, Wei enrolled at Harvard Business School in 1997, one of ten mainland Chinese students in a class of eight hundred. Beijing had only started allowing student exchanges in the 1970s, and most until that point had decided to stay in the U.S. and not return home after earning a degree. Even more opted to stay out of China following the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. For some members of this so-called Tiananmen generation, the U.S. offered a better shot, and the easy venture capital money of Silicon Valley’s dot-com days proved alluring. Others wanted to stay in the U.S. so they could raise more than one child under smog-free skies. Wei’s cohort were a close-knit group figuring out which country offered more promise at a time when the answer wasn’t so clear.
Wei had journeyed out and was ready to return. “We can’t sacrifice the present for the sake of tomorrow,” she told her classmates. “We should start doing right now what we really want to do.” She had seen the gray hair on her parents’ heads, and as their only child, she was the only caretaker they had. She soon after got a job in the Beijing office of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, where her life became a blend of her two countries and her career a reflection of the seismic changes the post-WTO China was implementing. A poster for the TV show Friends hung above her desk, and a Snoopy charm dangled from her cell phone. She got her coffee at Starbucks. Meanwhile, the Four Modernizations that her elementary school teachers had promised were coming true. Her father ditched the moped idea. By the end of the century, he could buy himself a car.
Wei joined Alibaba in 2008 and took over its Los Angeles entertainment office in 2014. To outsiders, Wei arrived on the West Coast with the world’s heaviest purse. She came on the heels of Alibaba’s record-setting public offering, which valued the company at $231 billion. Rumors swirled that Alibaba would succeed where Wanda had failed and be the first Chinese company to swallow a studio. In reality, Wei had been sent to Los Angeles with a more strategic mandate. The company’s first investment was a single movie, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, hardly a risk for a country already familiar with the franchise and its star. Alibaba set up merchandise tie-ins with local manufacturers to make toys and products attached to the film. Other one-off investments followed, all in movies that were natural fits in China: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Star Trek Beyond.
Ma had told Zhang to find a different kind of movie to bring back, those that were “small, big, positive.” That is, movies about small people with big hearts and a positive impact. Movies that Spielberg had directed into classic Americana. Movies that Wei suspected a changing China wanted to see.
“We grew up during that period where we’re all equal on food stamps. Now we’re able to dream for bigger things. It’s up to us, how to take our own destiny into our own hands. This is a period where people have dreams and want to see the little guy get their chance in the world,” Wei said.
Wolf Warrior 2 had given China a superhero. Wei was collecting evidence that other movies would give audiences their Amblin moment. Dying to Survive told the true and touching story of the Chinese cancer patient who provided drugs for his fellow patients. It made $453 million. Detective Chinatown 2 was a cop comedy sequel featuring a sleuth who uses feng shui, among other tools, to solve crimes: $524 million. Two amusement park workers who discover an ET in their midst must figure out what to do with the creature in Crazy Alien: $328 million. A troupe of dancers and singers navigate love and life while performing in the People’s Liberation Army in Youth: $236 million. An unhappy musician wakes up in the body of his teenage self, capable of redoing his adult years and becoming a pop star in the process, in Goodbye Mr. Loser: $228 million. The story of a couple’s romance is told in sections that alternate between their past in the countryside and their present in Beijing in Us and Them: $209 million.
In a matter of three years, the hit movies of China’s growing film industry would fill up the list of the country’s top fifty highest-grossing films of all time. By 2020, the U.S. accounted for only seventeen of these movies and only one of the top ten, while twenty-seven of the top fifty were Chinese movies released between 2017 and 2020. Such stories were similar to the artifacts of contemporary Hollywood, blockbusters like The Graduate, American Graffiti, Beverly Hills Cop, Home Alone—movies about everyday people that outperformed modern-day comic-book adaptations when ticket sales are adjusted for inflation. As China’s own movies took over the box office, the only American titles to break onto the list were the absolute biggest franchise movies Hollywood had to offer, like Avengers: Endgame, The Fate of the Furious, and Aquaman. The American industry, for all its know-how and receipts, could not best China’s own directors when it came to putting their own stories on-screen.
The release of Crazy Rich Asians, the adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s bestselling escapist book about love and friendship amid a pack of jet-setting, Fendi-wearing young people, was a noteworthy reminder. The movie was a smash hit in the U.S., where it made $174 million, and executives expected a windfall when the movie opened in China. But then authorities delayed its release, possibly because of its emphasis on “crazy” and “rich,” and social media users decried its portrayal of their people as money-obsessed chronic shoppers. When the movie finally did premiere in the country, the representation that had made it so novel in the U.S.—the first all-Asian cast in a studio film since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club—was old hat in a China now accustomed to seeing its own romantic comedies, starring its own actors and actresses. “Some of the things that made such a huge demand weren’t as intensely felt,” said producer Nina Jacobson. Crazy Rich Asians made $1.6 million.
The share of annual top ten releases gradually shifted toward Chinese movies. In 2014, the year of Transformers: Age of Extinction, five of the top ten highest-grossing movies in China were from Hollywood. In 2017, three were. In 2019, two were. The growth had always been in China. Now it was in Chinese movies.
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In 2016, Wei flew to the London set of Spielberg’s film Ready Player One. It was a surreal moment for Wei, who had caught up on much of Western cinema while in school in Pennsylvania. She’d watched E.T., crying each time the alien pled to “phone home,” since it was too expensive to call her parents in China more than every few months. At a dinner that evening, Alibaba and Amblin agreed to a deal in which Alibaba would take a small stake in the company in exchange for marketing and distribution rights on Amblin titles released in China. Less than twenty years earlier, Wei’s classmates at Harvard had stayed in the U.S. to work in Silicon Valley. Now Hollywood’s most famous director was coming to her Chinese company for help.
Alibaba executives looked at the Amblin slate and suggested they had a China hit in A Dog’s Purpose, a saccharine family movie about a reincarnating canine. A Dog’s Purpose cost $22 million to produce. It had no superheroes or special effects. It starred Dennis Quaid and a photogenic golden retriever. No executive making the movie thought it would “travel” to China, in the industry parlance. Amblin had sought a Chinese partner for its dinosaur movies, not its dog movies.
Wei and her colleagues thought differently. They had seen how Chinese audiences were flocking to family stories, but it was more than just a gut sense of shifting tastes that led to that conclusion. Alibaba had troves of data on more than five hundred million consumers, the Chinese middle class taking shape and living their lives online. Pet ownership across the country was rising, and Alibaba knew this better than anyone. They knew who bought dog bowls and the homes where they used them, thanks to their e-commerce platform. They knew who had watched dog movies on their streaming app in the past year, and their GPS service told them what theaters they passed on their way to work. A targeted campaign started advertising the movie to those users, and it propelled A Dog’s Purpose to an $88 million gross—31 percent higher than its total in the U.S. and Canada. Amblin raked in “money in the street” it had never expected.
China’s newer commercial film industry was late to the game compared with Hollywood, but this turned out to be an advantage. Marketing A Dog’s Purpose with such precision wouldn’t have been possible in the U.S., since Hollywood remains largely yoked to costly television commercials and billboards, broad campaigns that ignore the fact that moviegoers are most reachable through digital advertising. China’s late addition to the marketplace allowed it to absorb what had worked for Hollywood—and ignore what hadn’t. When it comes to getting movies in front of the people most likely to see them, Chinese companies have leapfrogged their counterparts in the U.S.
In Alibaba’s hands, Green Book, the Amblin drama about an African American pianist (Mahershala Ali) touring the Jim Crow South with a New York City bouncer (Viggo Mortensen), became a movie about loneliness. A single line of dialogue about people feeling alone was highlighted on posters, leaning into a sense of isolation that Wei thought pervaded China since the one-child policy had left her and most Chinese people without siblings. It was the kind of perceptive marketing that many Chinese partners might have landed on, but a cultural nuance that few American executives could be expected to intuit. After its studio hadn’t even planned on releasing Green Book in China, a movie that takes place largely in the Deep South of 1962 America made $71 million there—only $14 million shy of its home-market haul.
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Something was gnawing at Chinese entertainment leaders. Even as Hello Mr. Billionaire and similar titles collected billions of dollars, Hollywood still inspired more affection worldwide than any Chinese movie could. Wolf Warrior 2 was the first Chinese movie to break into the global top ten at the worldwide box office, but all of the other movies on the list collected grosses from dozens of countries. Wolf Warrior 2 was there with 99.7 percent of its ticket sales coming from a single market. The homegrown dramas and comedies selling out auditoriums in every Chinese town played only limited runs in Chinese immigrant neighborhoods in the U.S. and Europe, their grosses hardly ever totaling more than a few million dollars.
No one but the Chinese was watching Chinese movies, and everywhere you looked you saw affection for American entertainment: A bored boy on the subway in Qingdao is entertained with stickers of characters from Disney’s Cars. A Batman book bag sells in a shop outside Renny Harlin’s sound stage in Huairou. A middle-aged woman in Shanghai passes the afternoon wearing a black T-shirt with the Paramount Pictures logo across her chest.
At an annual gathering of film industry executives I attended in Shanghai in 2019, soon after those Chinese blockbusters had come out, one question dominated the discussion: How could China go from being a big market to being a beloved market? Though the conversation was about the movies, it stood in for China’s larger ambitions around the world—the struggle to turn infrastructure, medical supplies, and unapologetic patriotism into allegiance and goodwill.
“How do we come up with our own narratives?” was how Ren Zhonglun, the head of Shanghai Media Group, put it. Hollywood was obsessed with the “old days,” he said, never able to cite movies more modern than The Godfather as classics. Nonetheless, “is there a Chinese film that can join that rank?” What Chinese writers needed to understand, Ren said, was that a compelling character kept audiences engaged far more than an overengineered screenplay could. The myth of Star Wars or the appeal of The Avengers wouldn’t persist over a half dozen installments if audiences the world over didn’t grow attached to Luke Skywalker or Iron Man.
After the panel, the executives retired to a hotel conference room called Oscar. This Shanghai hotel, like Renny Harlin’s lodging in Huairou, was movie themed. The shooting scripts of old features sat in glass display cases throughout the hallway. Most of them were party-anniversary triumphalist pictures like The Opium Wars, a red movie produced to commemorate the tenth anniversary of National Day, encased not far from the shooting script of Deng Xiaoping in 1928, produced to commemorate what would have been the leader’s hundredth birthday. Even though these were the pro-party movies given the curated treatment, framed portraits of movie stars hung above the glass cases—not Chinese actors but Michael Douglas, Sean Connery, and Julia Roberts. Their faces, recognizable to any of the Shanghai residents gathered in the hotel that day, seemed to mock the executives who had just voiced their envy of Hollywood’s global appeal.
This would be the final hurdle in China’s own journey toward building its own Hollywood. No one remembers Deng Xiaoping in 1928, but everyone knows Julia Roberts’s smile. When would China be able to export something like that?
PART III
thirteen
Heartland
Paula Dvorchak’s mother was always getting the family involved in something like this. Not content to live the small-radius life of a small-town Iowan family, Eleanor Dvorchak—a New York transplant with her accent still intact—had taken her husband and three kids on overseas trips and volunteered for any cultural exchange their town of twenty-three thousand residents had to offer. And so it wasn’t entirely unexpected that, on a school night in 1985, fourteen-year-old Paula stood at her kitchen counter trying to make conversation with the two Chinese strangers her mother had invited to live with them for a week.
