After years of Hollywood pandering to China, the industry could face the prospect of films being banned in the country as a side effect of China’s tariff war with President Donald Trump.
China said unofficially it is considering “reducing or banning the import of U.S. films” as it looks for responses to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The possibility of a ban was raised by Liu Hong, a senior editor at the state-backed Xinhua News Agency, and Ren Yi, the influential grandson of Ren Zhongyi, former Communist Party chief of the Guangdong Province.
Variety noted that in 2024, China’s box office receipts totaled $5.8 billion, which the outlet termed “dull,” but said projections for this year were that Chinese movie-goers would send $7.6 billion Hollywood’s way.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” was the top-grossing movie at $132 million in 2024.
China has a huge population, but limits foreign movies to 34 films per year, and holds total control over movie content and distribution.
China has been trying to increase its movie production, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“They’re trying to beat Hollywood,” Stanley Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor, told the outlet. “This is becoming a patriotic issue [for China] as well as an economic issue.”
“For those films [the Chinese government] might accept, they’re not going to promote them,” Rosen added.
Acceptance means no detail is too small to tailor to Chinese sensibilities.
For example, in 2011, any reference to Chinese bad guys was scrubbed from “Red Dawn.”
Journalist and author Erich Schwartzel said censorship is only the beginning, according to NPR.
He said that for “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” the producers went over the top to integrate Chinese themes into the film.
“They held a reality show competition in which they cast four Chinese actors and actresses in cameo roles in the movie. They even filmed, I think, about a third of it in China, and then they also struck all these product placement deals that would suffuse the film with Chinese products, some of which make very little sense,” he said.
“So there is a scene in which the characters are in Chicago, and as they recover from the robot war, they have to raid a Chicago convenience store, where they just happened to buy Chinese protein powder. There is another scene where an ATM has to be used in the middle of Texas. It happens to be a Chinese ATM,” Schwartzel added.
That level of pandering to China “became the benchmark, and then a lot of other producers followed suit, some of whom would maybe try and strategically cast an actor and actress in a bit role or find a reason to take the plot to China,” he said.
Schwartzel said Chinese revenue has become a major part of the movie equation when the decision on whether or not a project can make money takes place.
“China’s allowed them to spend that money and justify it. Now in those green light meetings, with China being so uncertain, it’s much harder to take that risk,” he remarked.
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