Most questions are about the Tencent investment. Huffman's response:
> Our governance didn't change during this round, which means we didn't add anyone to the board, and our policies won't be changing either.
The statement that their policies aren't changing means nothing because it's what they would say regardless of the situation. Including if it's 100% true.
Perhaps nothing concrete are to come out from this investment (besides its performance), but it is an opportunity cost, and IF the opportunities aligns where one day Tencent able to act/pressure Reddit, it is already a win on multiple levels.
That has more to do with the Chinese box office being a 9 billion a year market than it does Chinese investors.
https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/star-wars-chi...
[Citation needed]
[Substantiation needed to show that marketing materials for films can be changed that quickly]
It's a poster. You take it to a printing press and ask for a few thousand new ones, it's NBD. If they didn't already have several alternate designs from before they selected this one, it's like an hour of mucking around in adobe CS to make Finn smaller and droids bigger, less if you have the original images on hand.
The Force Awakens:
US Box: $937M
Foreign Box: $1.132M
Chinese Box: $124M
The Black Panther:
US Box: $700M
Foreign Box: $647M
Chinese Box: $105M
The Black Panther outperformed in China compared to The Force Awakens as a % of it's domestic box office and as a % of it's total foreign box office.
I'd imagine they might have just seen Princess Leia/Han Solo as more recognizable on the posters for an audience that might not be into Star Wars as much as other audiences seem to be.
I’m sure China features plenty of movies featuring evil Chinese people.
As a German, it became somewhat tiresome in the 80s, although we obviously still deserved it (and much more). Then 9/11 got others into the hot seat for a decade.
This being fiction, any decision to give your villains some distinct national or ethnic identity seems suspect. I guess it’s fine, or at least necessary, I’d the fabric of the plot (Godfather, or that series where Hitler had won WW2). But if it just serves to tell apart good and bad guys by their accent (Die Hard), it seems like entirely unnecessary vilification.