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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Only 20 foreign movies are allowed into China per year. Unless part of the movie takes place in China.

Lots of movies have a special cut, just for that reason.

Modern blockbuster movies are already plagued with hectic editing and an overabundance of excuses-for-people-to-be-making-a-helicopter-landing. But some of the Chinese scenes/collaboration have worked out nicely. I can't be the only American ignorant of Chinese cityscapes. The Shanghai scene in "Skyfall" was one of the most movie's visually memorable images. Maybe "Pacific Rim"'s latter half would have taken place in Hong Kong without concern about the Chinese market (its title is Pacific Rim, after all, and a movie about robots beating monsters has a lot of freedom to be in contrived places). But apparently its popularity at the Chinese box office helped pave the way for a sequel, despite its disappointing receipts in the U.S. https://qz.com/110683/pacific-rim-trashed-hong-kong-but-won-...

This always reminds me that the city of Chongqing has 30m people and most people have never heard of it.

It's closer to 6-7 million: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16761784

Many of the 30 million people who are said to live in the city of Chongqing are actually agricultural workers living in a rural setting, he says.

In fact, he says, the area is so huge it's about the size of Austria.

Hangzhou is 9m in the urban area, and I’d never heard of it when I went to visit a friend there. There are very few points of interest there: it’s a bit like Fresno, only with 20x the population.

I thought Hangzhou was pretty cool. I had heard of it before going because it is famous for its tea. There is a lovely lake and mountain trails for hiking. Cool monastery and other holy places. I took a bike ride out into the tea fields and went to a tea museum too. It's a very popular destination for Chinese tourists, it has a lot of historic significance.

Beijing also. Officially it has 20 million people but less than 10 million are urban. Chinese cities are defined like little states.

When Bond enters the offices in Shanghai there is a Chinese security guard, but the actual office is quite distributive and is just north of Liverpool Street station in London. So does that count as “set in China”

Random trivia: significant parts of that Shanghai scene weren't in Shanghai. I did quite a double-take when bond walked off the street in Shanghai and into the lobby of my accountant's tower, here in London.

Other interesting examples:

Longmire, set in Wyoming, never set foot in Wyoming.

The Walking Dead has moved on to Virginia, but it's still filmed here in Georgia. Everyone complains about the grass "being cut," but that's realistic. It just doesn't grow, especially when there's no rain.

No one comments on how weird it is that, early on, the military firebombed downtown Atlanta to give survivors an edge, even though most of the population is out in the suburbs and exurbs. Torching all the population centers along I-85, I-20, and University Parkway would have given more people a clearer path to defensible locations. I don't care because it was a great scene, but it's weird how people's pedantry is rarely informed by actual knowledge.

This kind of thing is nothing new. My first experience with it was when I visited (and stayed in...it turned into a hostel) Luke's uncle's house from the original Star Wars film. I'm not sure why, but I was very surprised that the exterior of the home was shot somewhere else and looked nothing like the real outside of the building (well...hole, since it's dug out of the ground).

Another favorite of mine...anyone familiar with Paris will laugh at the car chase scene from Ronin where they teleport around the city from shot to shot.

This is no longer true, it’s up to 39 now for a few years. The Chinese co-production status is more about clawing back a higher percentage of viewing receipts from the state-owned film distributor.

From this link (http://chinafilminsider.com/foreign-films-in-china-how-does-...), I can tell that China import at least 34 foreign movies per year.

They changed it to 39 a few years ago. That is just a limit, not a target.

Note that you can buy any movies you want in ripped dvd form in the street, some restaurants or some shops anywhere in China. They even sold it on my campus uni. Its common practice to go there once a week to pick up a bunch of dvds

I heard that you can just download complete movies off of links from Baidu.

You can also "buy" the movie on Chinese marketplaces for ¥10 (~$1.5) and the seller will message you a Baidu Cloud link with the movie.

The DVD shops have been disappearing as more content is pirated online. Progress I guess.

Interesting, back then it was already really easy to use PPTV or other "apps" that would stream anything

Now that's an interesting thing that I had no idea was happening! Do you have any examples of movies that have an extended cut to include scenes from China?

Iron Man 3 is one such movie. There is a rather out of place China only product placement scene for some drink, a scene where Iron Man is seen visiting china on TV and a final scene where Tony goes to China to have a Chinese doctor (played by a famous Chinese movie star) help operate on him to remove the shrapnel from his chest.

All the scenes can be found of Youtube.

The milk product placement was funny. The doctor/nurse scene was just so weird and out of place.

Here's one of the better compilations I've found:

http://www.businessinsider.com/hollywood-movies-in-china-201...

I'm not an expert on this, but I think the China-set scenes are generally included in the U.S. theatrical cut, Skyfall's sniper fight in Shanghai being an example [0]. I did a little more Googling and found there were a few examples of scenes meant only for China and left out of the U.S. release. Iron Man 3 apparently had 4 more minutes in which Dr. Wu gets some time to hawk Chinese products [1]. Apparently, some notable Chinese bloggers/moviegoers didn't like the obvious shilling [2].

There are far more examples of things being cut out than being added. In Skyfall's Shanghai scene for example, Chinese censors apparently didn't like the bit where Bond kills a security guard. The listed reasoning for the cuts are heavy-handed to the point of amusement, e.g. ""Mission: Impossible 3" dropped a shot of clothes on clotheslines in Shanghai for the Chinese cut. Apparently, the lack of dryer ownership is a sensitive issue." [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMW4dN5sGb0

[1] https://kotaku.com/why-many-in-china-hate-iron-man-3s-chines...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39m85puOQok

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/...

edit: Apparently Looper, which changed one of its locales from Paris to Shanghai, has extra scenes for Chinese audiences:

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the_extra_looper_scenes_y

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