For nearly ten years, Erich Schwartzel has been covering the film industry for the Wall Street Journal. He was the privileged witness of Hollywood’s seduction enterprise against the People’s Republic of China. To access this exponentially growing market (rising from $180 million in revenue in 2004 to more than $9 billion in 2019, i.e. 8.6 billion euros), the major American studios have multiplied friendly gestures – each blockbuster has its own Chinese star – and investments, the most spectacular of which was the opening of the Disneyland park in Shanghai. But also gestures of self-censorship. From Disney’s sabotaged release of Kundun, the filmed biography of the Dalai Lama produced by Martin Scorsese in 1997, to the modification, twenty years later, of the final sequence of Transformers: The Last Knightto give the good role to the People’s Army, Erich Schwartzel, in Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (“Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy”Penguin Press, 400 pages, 26.50 euros, untranslated) tells a story surprisingly similar to that of the American studios facing Nazi Germany, between 1933 and 1941, made up of ultimately useless compromises.
For the American journalist, Hollywood’s confidence in the transformative power of “soft power” American has broken on the political project of the Chinese regime. The latter has, in fact, succeeded both in ensuring the domination of the domestic market by national productions and in limiting the share which goes to American studios.
When did you finish writing your book, and would you change anything about your conclusions?
I completed the survey in the fall of 2020. It seems to me that today there is a lot of evidence to support what I am finding. Over the past eighteen months, the rest of the world’s relations with China have become strained. Regarding Beijing’s relationship with Hollywood, frustration is growing on the American side about the possibility of moving forward. Access to the Chinese market appears to be increasingly uncertain.
Are we close to the point where the studios are going to say “better not to” ?
The Chinese market is no longer seen as an imperative. From what I know, when the heads of Hollywood majors give the green light to a film, the receipts in China are no longer counted. It is no longer known if the films will have access to Chinese theaters [en raison des quotas imposés par Pékin ou de la censure], nor whether they will meet with success there. However, I believe that, even if we consider Chinese receipts as random income, they still represent considerable sums, and the studios will continue to ensure that this access is not compromised because of the content of the films they produce. Finally, I want to point out that all the studios are entities that belong to parent companies that have other interests in China.
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