🌊 How China Took Over Hollywood

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In 2010, China accounted for about $1.5B of the global box office – a fraction of the US’s $10B. By 2015, China’s share hit $6.5B, surpassing all markets except North America. Since 2019, its film market has surpassed the US’.

Enabling China’s film market rise was an increase in screen counts from 4,000 in 2007 to over 80,000 by 2020, fueled by a growing middle class hungry for entertainment. While tickets were and are cheaper in China, the country’s population is more than four times that of the US, offsetting that difference.  

And as that market grew, Hollywood began catering to it, creating movies for the potentially more lucrative Chinese market. By 2024, over 70% of Hollywood’s box-office revenue came from outside North America, with China by far the biggest player. 

One consequence of catering to China is the franchise frenzy we’ve seen over the last 15 years: Superhero movies, animated franchises, and effects-driven sequels are more reliant on visuals than dialogue or cultural nuance, meaning they translate well across languages and cultures.

Can you imagine Silver Linings Playbook being a smash hit with a Chinese audience? Nobody knows who the Eagles are. The same goes for Whiplash, Manchester By The Sea, and other more nuanced and critically-acclaimed films that already struggle with American audiences. Many have attributed this to the decline of the big-budget comedies that Hollywood used to crank out. 

Marvel’s superhero epics explain why: Avengers: Endgame earned $600M+ in China alone, and China is consistently the second-largest and sometimes even the top-grossing territory for Marvel movies. The success of superhero, animated, and other culturally-generic movies has resulted in a boom in movies that are designed for overseas audiences.

Another striking case was 2016’s Warcraft, a video game adaptation. It flopped stateside (just $47M domestic gross) but became a sensation in China, raking in $220M. In the end, nearly 90% of Warcraft’s total earnings came from overseas markets, mostly from China. Or take the Fast & Furious franchise, which found new life thanks to international audiences: By the mid-2010s, each installment was earning 70% or more of its revenue abroad, with China often contributing hundreds of millions. Kung Fu Panda 3, Fast 8, Fast 9, Godzilla vs. Kong, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Ready Player One all made more money in China than they did in the US.

The pivot to China has brought a lot of money into Hollywood, but at what cost? 

Earlier this year, US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote an op-ed in the NY Post that excoriated China’s influence over Hollywood, tracing the corruption back to the 1990s:

Cotton is a notorious China hawk who approaches this issue with that perspective, yet it’s undeniable that Hollywood studios have kowtowed to China in a number of major movies.

In 2020, a 94-page report by the literary and human rights group PEN America noted dozens of instances of films altering content to appease Chinese officials. 

For example, Marvel’s Doctor Strange changed a major character’s ethnicity – in the comics, the character was Tibetan, but the film cast a Celtic character instead – specifically to avoid alienating Chinese viewers. The James Bond thriller Skyfall quietly cut a scene where Chinese security guards are killed, and Mission: Impossible III edited out a line identifying Shanghai’s backdrop as an “anonymous” location – all to steer clear of portraying Chinese authorities in a negative light. In the zombie blockbuster World War Z, a subplot suggesting a virus originated in China was reportedly scrubbed from the script to secure approval. 

Socially progressive content has also been scrubbed, with filmmakers going so far as to omit references to Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality in Bohemian Rhapsody. Scenes in Alien: Covenant and Star Trek Beyond hinting at gay relationships were trimmed for Chinese audiences, while Chinese theaters refused to distribute Star Wars: The Force Awakens unless the black stormtrooper, played by John Boyega, was removed from the poster. 

Two of the most egregious examples of Hollywood “capitulating” to China came with Top Gun: Maverick and the live-action remake of Mulan.

The Top Gun: Maverick team preemptively removed the Taiwanese and Japanese flag patches from Tom Cruise’s iconic fighter jacket in early trailers, replacing them with meaningless symbols in the same for fear that even a fleeting nod to Taiwan’s flag could jeopardize its release in China. 

Meanwhile, Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan was filmed in China’s Xinjiang region, where rights groups say 1M Muslim Uyghurs are detained in prison camps. The film thanked this region in its closing credits without any mention of what was happening there. 

These changes are often made not necessarily at the explicit order of Chinese censors but out of an abundance of caution. As the PEN America 2020 study warned, the “long arm of Chinese censorship” has reached deep into Hollywood.

But the cruel irony for Hollywood is that China no longer needs Hollywood. Due to a combination of protectionist policies and the successful takeoff of its own movie industry, Hollywood’s slice of China’s box office shrank to roughly 5% by 2023. 

It’s since rebounded a bit – Hollywood currently claims three of the top 10 movies in China’s box office – but it’s still a far cry from what it used to be. Chinese audiences now have more Chinese movies made by Chinese studios. 

This has left Hollywood with a major hole in its revenue – and given Beijing leverage. 

In 2025, amid US-China trade tensions, China announced it would “moderately reduce” the number of American films allowed in as retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. US studios are now trying to circumvent this risk by partnering with Chinese studios to make movies, and Disney and Universal – two of the four biggest American studios – have continued to expand their park presences in China. 

But the fact is that Hollywood is now torn between its home country and China, and no scrubbing, censorship, or appeasement will change that.