Some things you would expect, like don't mention Taiwan, or being critical of China. There's some weird stuff too, like no "time travel" and no "ghosts".
China may be changing the "Summer Blockbuster" segment of the industry but it's quite the stretch to say they are destroying the whole thing. Plenty of great movies still come out every year.
There's plenty of argument that the Academy Awards aren't necessarily the best movies but even if you look at the movies represented this year, there were a lot of good ones and I don't think any of them were influenced by China. Obviously you can't prove it unless the filmmakers confirm it, but certainly there are a lot of movies with themes that would be unacceptable to Chinese censors.
Maybe the plot of "Transformers 7" isn't as good as it could have been without Chinese influence but as long as movies like "The Power of the Dog" (or "Licorice Pizza" or "Belfast" or "Flee" if animation is more up your alley or ... take your pick) are coming out, I'd say the industry is doing ok.
According to this Quora post, it doesn't appear to be the case[0]
0. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-movies-about-time-travel-banne...
It’s not so much that time travel itself is banned, it’s that the Chinese government has a bunch of rules that make time travel movies impossible to execute.
For example, the Chinese government wishes to protect the dignity and honor of historical culture. And that means, any movie made of those time periods must fundamentally be serious.
Also, it’s possible that whoever is running the movie review board personally thinks time travel is “too silly”.
I wonder what a world where he won would look like?
So, what's the "danger" in the concept alone? I'm assuming they have a "rational" explanation behind the decision. What is it?
I think that excerpt from the article answers my question.
https://www.quora.com/In-The-Force-Awakens-poster-is-making-...
I’ve traveled extensively in China. From my own personal experience they are extremely racist. The difference is night and day, you cross the “border” at the airport and the ads all become incredibly pale.
Hong Kong and tier-1 China are basically everything you’d imagine in a white supremacists wet dream, but Asian.
They don’t possess any concept of white guilt, they have no cultural shame and are not susceptible to identity politics. They are “friendly supremacist”. They will smile in your face producing xxx,xxx,xxx widget per year while hating your guts.
Why? Seems the market was plenty big enough prior to their ascendancy.
It was probably upvoted again (as happens a lot when people comment on downvotes) by the time you found the comment.
This is how we get movies like Skyscraper(2018)[0]. $120M budget. $70M from US/Canada. $300 from "worldwide" and most of that was from China. Just the Chinese opening weekend alone was $48M.
Transformers: Age of Extinction. $210M budget. China alone provided $300M of profit.
All you need to do is hire Chinese actors for side characters, set a bit of your movie in China and not talk about Taiwan. Easy money =)
Robert Downey Jr. $2.4B 5'9"
Tom Cruise $8B 5'1"
Tom Hanks $9B 6'
Dustin Hoffman $2.5B 5'6"
What his publicist says should be taken with a grain of salt.