Offers that Hollywood can’t refuse

Movie studios in the US bend to Beijing’s wishes to get a foothold in the world’s biggest market

By Hari Kumar

“I will make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

This line from the Hollywood classic The Godfather remains one of the most remembered. The American Film Institute voted it the second-most memorable line in cinema history. (Clarke Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” in Gone With The Wind is still the top one).

The Godfather line spoken by Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone (and repeated later by Michael Corleone in the movie) had captured the essence of the mafia world where subtle threats are used to bend the ways for self-interest.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, the seemingly innocent line’s real power comes through one of the most dramatic scenes in that movie: A movie Moghul, who refuses to accept the demand of the mafia boss, wakes up to find the severed head of his favourite horse on his bed. The Hollywood studio then relents and make changes to accommodate the wishes of the Corleone family.

That was fiction.

Five decades later, Hollywood faces real-life pressure to change scripts and drop actors. Not from underworld dons, but from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

China’s fast-paced economic growth has made it an attractive market for movie makers. By 2020, the world’s most populous nation had become the largest movie market. However, the entry of foreign films is highly regulated. Only 34 foreign movies are allowed to circulate in the country every year. So the competition to get a slice of that pie is high.

The CCP might be justified in being wary of the Hollywood soft power as American movies have invariably fashioned the West as the saviours of the world and others as villains. For example, during the Cold War era, the Russians were typecast as despicable. Muslims and Arabs were given that role after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

China reacted angrily to some movies that the authorities thought breached their interests. In 1997, two movies, Kundun and Seven Days in Tibet, featured Dalai Lama’s story. Beijing went immediately on an offensive and banned Disney and Universal.

“It taught the studios a powerful lesson about how aggressively the CCP would wield its powers against Hollywood depictions that struck against its interests,” says Stanley Rosen, professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California.

The situation changed as China embarked on a theatre-building spree in the last decade. The country had fewer than 20,000 cinema screens in 2013, but the number rose to some 41,000 by 2017, overtaking the US.

The colossal revenue this vastly expanded market offered Hollywood, even with the tightly controlled market opening, meant studio bosses were eager to kowtow before the Beijing officials.

Hollywood scriptwriters and studios quickly learned to avoid taboo subjects like Tibet and Taiwan. No one dared to take any chance.

When the trailer for the sequel of Top Gun was released, it showed even movies with superstars like Tom Cruise played by China’s rules. In the trailer clip, fans noticed Cruise’s leather bomber jacket had a different look from its prequel – gone were the flags of Japan and Taiwan.

“Access to that market can make or break the success of a major Hollywood film,” says James Tager, the author of the 2020 PEN America report.

The patriotic fervour fanned by the CCP made the Chinese audience super sensitive to the slightest affront, and film stars who overstepped Beijing’s red lines, even unknowingly, went crawling on their knees, like the Fast and Furious 9 star John Cena did last year after inadvertently calling Taiwan a country.

In 2018, Beijing announced that Central Propaganda Department would be in charge of checking all media, including foreign films. Some critics believe this was the beginning of a push to have China portrayed “correctly” even in the movies shown elsewhere in the world.

“By censoring American blockbusters, Beijing believes it can prevent American and global audiences from imagining the Chinese Communist Party as a major threat, and from viewing the targets of China’s repression as victims worthy of sympathy,” writes Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, an Axios reporter who is currently writing a book on China’s quest for global influence.

The hyper-active censors are now getting scorned even by the movie fans in China. The overzealousness of the officials was on display when the 1999 Brad Pitt-Edward Norton starred Fight Club was released online last month.

The original movie ends with bombs going off in the climax as a subversive plot to reorder society. But the censors in Beijing didn’t like it. They inserted a twist. Instead of the blasts, a slide comes up saying the police foiled the plot, arrested the criminals, and sent a major character to a “lunatic asylum.”

The movie fans didn’t take to the changes lightly.

Some said this kind of intervention would drive fans to watch the bootleg copies to the original version. “There is no point watching this film without that scene,” a person commented on the microblogging site Weibo. 

“Probably Ocean’s 11 would have all been arrested. The Godfather’s entire family would end up in jail,” another person said in ridicule. 

According to Vice magazine, a source familiar with the matter said the copyright owner edited the Fight Club. Afterwards, the government watchdog approved it before selling it to the streaming sites for distribution.

Hardly had this row died down, a call now has gone out to ban the sequel of The Matrix as its star Keanu Reeves is listed to attend a benefit concert for Tibet activists in the US.

As the PEN America report says, the long arm of China is now reaching into activities in other countries, and most of the studios are bending backwards to accommodate the diktats of the CCP. It also called for an open discussion on this and support for the creative artists.

But there is very little hope of that as the report says the Walt Disney Studio, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, and the Motion Picture Association declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

Hollywood screenwriter Howard Rodman neatly summed up the situation.

“We’re in the ceiling-painting business,” he said, referring to the days of patronage-funded art during the Renaissance. “When you’re in the painting business, you work for popes.”