Report: Hollywood Is Falling Big In China, With Zero American Movies Making The Top 10 For 2023
Stephen Kent
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Americans aren’t the only ones rejecting the reheated gruel Hollywood is producing. A new report from the New York Times shows that in 2023, approximately zero American movies made it into the top 10 for China’s box office, prompting renewed concerns within the global film industry that movie studios have lost their way.
Despite the release of highly anticipated sequels in the Mission: Impossible, Fast & the Furious, and Spider-Man franchises, none managed to get a foothold in China’s lucrative market.
The NYT’s data comes from Maoyan, a Chinese entertainment analytics provider, and they show that neither Oppenheimer nor Barbie, two of Hollywood’s biggest financial hits in the previous year, even made it to the top 30 at the Chinese box office.
Professor Stanley Rosen from the University of Southern California, an expert in Chinese politics and the film industry, told the New York Times, “The days when a Hollywood film would make hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in China — that’s gone.”
Hollywood’s historic appeal with Chinese audiences dates back to at least 1994 with the release of the Harrison Ford blockbuster, The Fugitive. In 2012, seven out of the top 10 highest-grossing movies in China were American-made. But something has changed.
Chinese audiences have been increasingly turning to domestically produced films such as Full River Red and Wandering Earth II, which emerged as their top movies in 2023. The trend reflects China’s domestic efforts to elevate the quality of its own film industry, diverting viewership away from Hollywood productions.
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The Chinese Communist Party’s influence is obvious. The government actively supports and promotes Chinese filmmaking and the top-grossing films in China include, The Battle at Lake Changjin and Wolf Warrior 2 which both feature patriotic messaging about triumphing over American adversaries.
China is actively seeking to shape its cultural narrative and unite its people around CCP doctrines. They do this while simultaneously pushing their values into American studies and onto U.S. audiences, and suppressing America’s more liberal values in their own market.
Warner Bros. notably removed dialogue from Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which alluded to Dumbledore being gay. It’s not lost on American audiences that Hollywood treats their values of diversity and inclusion as a sacred imperative domestically, but happily caves to foreign pressure to extract box office revenue from the Chinese market.
Americans have grown far too familiar with incidents of Chinese censorship of American studios. There was the uproar over Top Gun: Maverick regarding Tom Cruise donning a Taiwan flag patch on his jacket, and even the contentious depiction of the South China Sea map in the Barbie movie.
Disney infamously chose the Xinjiang province of China as the filming location for its live-action Mulan, an area where an estimated 1 million Muslim Uyghurs are reportedly detained in camps.
At the time, the House of Mouse thanked China for its cooperation in the film credits, acknowledging eight government entities in Xinjiang including the public security bureau in the city of Turpan.
The credits also express gratitude to the publicity department of the CPC Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Committee, an agency involved in producing state propaganda initiatives and the suppression of information about the Uyghur camps.
While Hollywood once enjoyed widespread success in China, recent releases have faced challenges. Warner Bros.’ superhero sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, struggled at the Chinese box office, grossing a mere $60 million in a few weeks despite heavy promotion from actor Jason Momoa.
This decline contrasts sharply with the $293 million grossed by the first Aquaman movie in China back in 2018, highlighting the evolving preferences of Chinese moviegoers and control by the CCP.
Two things are happening here.
China’s market is closing. Under tighter control and nationalism from the Chinese Communist Party, the culture is rapidly turning against any sort of cross-pollination with Western values and storytelling.
Repeated clashes with American studios over content have resulted in a few wins for the CCP, where Hollywood has censored their own movies in order to access the market, but still underwhelmed Chinese moviegoers.
At the same time, Hollywood has tried to have it both ways by prioritizing films that will sell in China and censoring Western values in the process, while simultaneously lecturing American audiences about morality in the media and at the Academy level.
The balancing act is falling apart. Will Hollywood return to making movies that Americans are proud of and champion our traditional values? Only time will tell.
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