Some of the narrative choices studios have made to appeal to Chinese audiences haven’t been particularly intrusive or inherently negative. (The strategy worked: Ant-Man picked up an additional $101 million in China, its biggest take outside the States.) An observer can see the success of Tony Stark and his fellow masked hero Star-Lord - Guardians of the Galaxy raked in $86 million in China - trickling down into Ant-Man’s character design. One simple example: the Iron Man movies played like gangbusters abroad, so when the time came to bring Ant-Man to the screen, the advertising played up the character as another high-tech masked defender instead of emphasizing the Paul Ruddness of it all. Tinseltown executives saw that Chinese audiences were far more interested in watching American movies than vice versa, and started to place greater emphasis on elements pandering to trans-Pacific demographics. By 2013, the country boasted the second-largest sum total of box-office receipts for the year, with a staggering $3.6 billion USD. At a certain height of budgeting, movies turn into products that must be mass-distributed to maximize their earning potential, which can be a tough way to make art - especially when questions of propaganda and human-rights violations come into play.Īs what academics have termed the “Asian century” began, the rising tide of rapid economic growth in China lifted the boat of its film industry. America’s major studios have spent upward of a decade tweaking their releases to enhance their overseas appeal. Monster Hunter may seem like just another SFX-spectacle-of-the-week, but it offers a telling look into the ongoing courtship between Hollywood and China, two giants standing astride a global film economy dominated by a shrinking number of conglomerates. Its smooth synthesis of eclectic reference points makes for a curious but roundly entertaining specimen - a far cry from the usual Frankensteined-together attempts at an international hit. The film is a little Sergio Leone and a little Zhang Yimou. Monster Hunter’s moneymaking prospects in China seem to have been quashed by that faux pas, but from a film critic’s perspective, Anderson made the movie into a clinic on how to make a multinational co-production that isn’t unwieldy or dull. An evolved sense of artistry couldn’t preclude the political friction that often accompanies these kinds of international affairs. Even after a re-edit to remove the offending section, it was rejected from public exhibition. A line of dialogue that evoked a World War II-era racist schoolyard chant got the film pulled from Chinese cinemas and review-bombed into oblivion. Anderson’s apocalyptic-Western minimalism matches Asian sensibilities to North American ones better than most movies attempting to reconcile the two, but something was still lost in translation. Anderson’s latest CGI bonanza was intended to be a huge hit in the lucrative Chinese movie market. Financed in part by Chinese conglomerate Tencent and working in a style informed by Chinese blockbusters, Paul W.S. Though a Tenet-class theaters-only rollout has made the new epic movie Monster Hunter impossible to watch in many United States cities, it’s already caused a stir across the Pacific.
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