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Why you won’t see a Chinese villain in a Hollywood film any time soon

  • China’s Hollywood influence remains firm despite rejected changes in Top Gun: Maverick and Lightyear
  • Hollywood studios’ exposure to China and desire for access to its box office mean films will keep tiptoeing around Beijing’s sensitivities for years to come
Tom Cruise’s character (right) wears a bomber jacket with a patch featuring the Taiwanese flag in the original Top Gun film. The flag was initially replaced in the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, before being put back in before the film’s full release. Photo: Twitter

The Taiwan flag stayed on Tom Cruise’s jacket in Top Gun: Maverick, and Disney refused to make cuts to the animated Toy Story prequel Lightyear. Hooray for Hollywood. Studios have finally stopped kowtowing to Beijing.

Not so fast. Paramount’s Top Gun, a film glorifying US military strength, was never going to get a China release anyway. Disney’s censoring of a same-sex kiss in Lightyear – more than a dozen mostly Muslim-majority countries made the same request – would have been untenable after it issued a statement supporting LGBTQ rights.

Covid-19 controls and testy US-China relations mean Hollywood films have a difficult time securing a China release. Last year, foreign films under the revenue-share quota system only accounted for 12.5 per cent of China’s box office compared with more than 50 per cent a decade ago. Instead, Beijing is giving priority to locally made propaganda epics like The Battle at Lake Changjin, now the highest-grossing Chinese film ever.

Does this mean film fans might see a return of the Chinese villain on the big screen? After all, Chinese filmmakers often depict Americans as the bad guy. Not likely. If the mainland Chinese film market opens up again, Hollywood won’t want to risk getting shut out by offending Beijing in the meantime.

To be sure, studios might stand firm on small things – thus avoiding a backlash at home – but steering clear of storylines that could anger Beijing is now baked into the DNA of modern-day Hollywood.

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Before it was seduced by China’s box office, Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese people on the big screen ranged from admiration to fear and loathing, depending on the political climate of the times. Big stars such as James Stewart and Van Johnson featured in World War II films such as The Mountain Road and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, respectively, where the Chinese were shown as US allies. “You’re our kind of people,” Johnson’s character says to a Chinese doctor who saves his life.

That all changed when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party took power in 1949. Cold War-era films pitted Americans against the “red menace” – whether Soviet or Chinese – in films such as John Wayne’s Blood Alley and The Manchurian Candidate, in which communists brainwash an American soldier in a plot to overthrow the US government.

In the following decades, some memorable Chinese villains appeared in Hollywood films, including Roy Chiao’s gangster in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Jet Li’s martial arts bad-ass in Lethal Weapon 4. After China’s box office crossed the US$2 billion mark in 2011, that quickly changed.

It was a loss for film fans. Screen villains enhance a screen story, provided they are not one-dimensional stereotypes like Fu Manchu. Chinese nationalists might even enjoy seeing a strong, smart Chinese villain pitted against an American protagonist, especially if their guy lives to fight another day.

The most memorable villains have shades of grey and a backstory to explain their motivation, which is often revenge for a wrong done to them. That way, audiences can express some degree of sympathy when the evil scientist or doctor meets their ultimate demise. Watch any Marvel movie to see this formula at work.

The original script for Red Dawn, a remake of the Cold War-era story of the Soviet Union invading the US heartland, depicted Chinese as the invaders. The backstory, however implausible, was that Beijing ordered the invasion to “repossess” America after Washington defaulted on its Treasury debt to China.

MGM, the studio behind the remake, digitally changed the Chinese soldiers to North Koreans to avoid a backlash, but the resulting story suffered because there was no reason Pyongyang would invade the US. “North Korea. It doesn’t make any sense,” was a line dubbed in later by actor Josh Peck.

Outside of Netflix, which has little to lose financially because it has no presence in China, we are unlikely to see a Chinese villain on the big screen any time soon.

Major studios such as Disney – which owns Twentieth Century Fox and Marvel – and Columbia, owned by Sony, have significant non-movie businesses in China that could be the target of reprisals, so they won’t take risks.

It seems Hollywood is still paying the price for decades of yellowface and stereotyping. If a writer turned that into a script, the working title could be Revenge of the Chinamen.

Craig Addison was an independent filmmaker in Hong Kong before joining the Post as a production editor