Hours after Donald Trump imposed record 125% tariffs on Chinese products entering the US, China has announced it will further curb the number of US films allowed to screen in the country.
The move mirrors the potential countermeasure suggested by two influential Chinese bloggers earlier in the week, warning that “China has plenty of tools for retaliation”.
Both Liu Hong, a senior editor at Xinhuanet, the website of the state-run Xinhua news agency, as well as Ren Yi, the grandson of former Guangdong party chief Ren Zhongyi, posted an identical proposal involving a heavy reduction on the import of US movies and further investigation of the intellectual property benefits of American companies operating in China.
China is the world’s second largest film market after the US, although in recent years domestic offerings have outshone Hollywood imports. However, Thursday’s measure comes as a significant blow to western studios, with Bloomberg reporting shares of Walt Disney Co, Paramount Global, and Warner Bros Discovery Inc all suffering an immediate decline.
Last week, the newly released A Minecraft Movie from Warner Bros topped the Chinese box office with ticket sales of $14.5m – around 10% of the global total. In 2024, the highest-grossing US film released in China was Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which took $132m in that territory, towards a global total of $572m.
The first US film was approved for Chinese release 31 years ago, with the number peaking at more than 60 in 2018. Since then it has declined, according to data from the Chinese ticketing service Maoyan Entertainment, thanks to escalating tensions and the increased popularity of homegrown movies.
Animated fantasy film Ne Zha 2, about a child battling monsters from Chinese mythology, was released in late January and has now taken $1.8bn in China, and $20m in the US.
This… might actually be an improvement. Okay, hear me out. The film industry has been overloaded lately with over-bloated budgets for CG light shows with little substance, narrative, or character appeal. A BIG part of the reason for that is because for the last decade or two Hollywood has been making as much or more money from the Chinese box office as they do the US. As such, they have prioritized the lowest common denominator between what will sell between both countries. That stuff that sells is visual effects, action, basic stories, simple characters, and non-politically or culturally challenging content that will be censored.
This has SEVERELY limited film making and resulted in a lot of samey uninteresting stuff coming out in theatre’s for years now. It has killed witty comedies that do not transcend culture or language well. It has killed divisive narratives that wouldn’t get the Chinese government’s approval. It has dumbed down stories and killed nuance so that that audiences don’t need cultural context to understand them.
If studios no longer think they can make money hand over foot off the Chinese box office with another cgi robot movie or some such shlock, they may make more unique, smaller budget films with more complex characters, better humor, counter-cultural aspects, challenging narratives, and minimal CGI. They can stop exclusively farming all the existing globally recognizable IP to rehash the same stories over and over with updated visuals. They can revitalize an industry that sorely needs it.