This week, Neil Calloway explains why China being afraid of ghosts harms Hollywood…
Despite much antagonism towards the film, and mixed reviews, Ghostbusters has so far managed to make $80 million globally; not bad going for a film that everyone thought – and some hoped – would crash and burn.
However, news came this week that the film will not get an official release in China. The reason given is that Chinese censors are fed up with unoriginal ideas for movies and wish, instead of just remaking old films Hollywood should make some new films that are just as good as the ones we all grew up with. That’s a joke, of course – it’s because they don’t allow films that “promote cults or superstitions”. The original film was never given a theatrical release in China (where its title translated as the excellent “Ghost Catcher Dare Die Team”) either.
As China has had a growing influence on box office take, this will be a blow to the studio if they can’t get the ban overturned. For the past few years Hollywood has been wooing China with transnational film deals, China based film plots and Chinese characters as it becomes a more lucrative market and domestic – as in US – box office decreases and global markets open up. China is obviously keen on Western culture; just this week yet another English football club was bought by a Chinese consortium. The country will have an increasing influence on film in years to come.
For all the talk of fan boys boycotting the film because it hurts their memories of their childhoods – instead of going to see it I presume they’ll spend the time selling rare photos of Sean Connery signed by Roger Moore and complaining about continuity errors in episodes of Itchy and Scratchy – a few thousand people not paying to see it will not hurt as much as a country of over a billion people not being able to see it (or being forced to watch a pirated copy).
Duncan Jones’s recent Warcraft effort has so far made a disappointing $47 million at the US box office (with over half that coming on its opening weekend), however, it has made $350 million worldwide, with $220 million of that coming from China, where the game has a huge following, and where it was released during a holiday. Soon, China will have more cinema screens than the US, and will undoubtedly overtake it as the most important film market.
Ghostbusters is an important movie for Sony, and being denied an increasingly lucrative market will be a blow; you can expect Hollywood films to shy away from promoting “cults or superstitions” if they want to make money. US box office might be good for a film’s credibility, but Chinese box office is better for bank balances.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
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