Attorney General Bill Barr gave Hollywood studios and celebrities a verbal lashing during a speech Thursday in which he outlined the threat that China’s growing …
Attorney General Bill Barr gave Hollywood studios and celebrities a verbal lashing during a speech Thursday in which he outlined the threat that China’s growing sphere of influence poses to democracy and freedom.
“Every year at the Academy Awards, Americans are lectured about how this country falls short of Hollywood’s ideals of social justice. But Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights,” Barr said during the address at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan.
Barr criticized Hollywood’s growing addiction to China’s box office, which has become the second largest in the world. In order to gain access to China, studios must submit their movies to Beijing’s censors, which limit the number of foreign titles that get to play in Chinese cinemas.
Hollywood studios are also teaming up with Chinese studios in a way that Barr said gives China access to U. S. technology and industry know-how. China’s Tencent Pictures has partnered on such blockbusters as Wonder Woman and Bumblebee, while Alibaba Pictures was a producer on the last Mission: Impossible movie,
Legendary Pictures, the studio behind Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the Jurassic World sequels, is owned by China’s Wanda Group.
