Hollywood likes to paint itself as a progressive pioneer of social justice, however, a new report highlights how the preference to release films in the Chinese market leads primary film studios to violate their own social justice dogma. In fact, this leads them to import the values of the Chinese Communist Party, the organization with the largest number of people in human history.
The report through PEN America, a non-profit organization that promotes freedom of expression in literature, examines a collection of films that have been subjected to Chinese censorship in order to access the Chinese film market. China allows the release of 34 foreign films in the country’s year, and in 2018, China’s quarterly revenues surpassed those of the United States for the first time. Before the pandemic, China’s revenues in 2023 were projected at r$15.5 billion.
Some Chinese censorship is minor, a propaganda that can only be captured through intelligent viewers. Paramount cut the Taiwanese flag off Tom Cruise’s jacket for the sequel to Top Gun, while the film DreamWorks Abominable (a collaboration with Pearl Studio of China) featured the nine-stroke line, a propaganda map claiming China over the South China Sea.
Hollywood studios oppose the principles of social justice that drive in the United States. Wonder has remarkably bleached a primary Tibetan character in Doctor Strange to avoid offending the Chinese passing government. Studios ranging from Warner Brothers to Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox have removed same-sex kissing scenes from the films or removed them through China during the film’s broadcast. A complaint from a devoted organization in the United States, on the other hand, would only make laughter.
The most troubling conclusion of the report is not that individual scenes are censored or self-censored, but that the studios have made the decision to base primary film decisions in China, infrequently even uninvited. Unfortunately, Marvel appealed to Chinese regulators the filming of Iron Man 3 to make sure the film stayed within limits and added more scenes to the Chinese edition of the film featuring Chinese doctors saving Iron Man’s life.
The days when Hollywood supported human rights in his paintings have disappeared. The 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet, which describes the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, blacklisted director Jean-Jacques Annaud until his stealthy apology 12 years later. Film star Brad Pitt also sanctioned the film, which probably helped keep World War Z from premiering in China.
Change is not a lost cause. The industry’s biggest stars have the strength to gather for this, as when Quentin Tarantino refused to point to a redistribution of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to appease Chinese censors. But if Hollywood’s other influential voices aren’t even willing to protect their own artistic freedom, why would they take a position in the name of the human rights of others they won’t even know?