It’s no secret that Hollywood has made a habit of appeasing China in the hopes of earning big yuan at the Beijing box office. The latest embarrassment
It’s no secret that Hollywood has made a habit of appeasing China in the hopes of earning big yuan at the Beijing box office. The latest embarrassment came when action star John Cena debased himself by giving an extended apology on Sina Weibo, also known as “Chinese Twitter,” for saying Taiwan is a country during his promotion for the latest “Fast and Furious” movie. Cena’s original statement about Taiwan’s political status was, in fact, correct. But it raised the ire of the Chinese Communist Party, which considers the democratic nation part of its territory under the “One China Principle.” The following movies by no means represent the extent of the entertainment industry’s recent obeisance to China, but they are some of the most notorious cases. The original 1984 classic about a group of teens fending off a Soviet invasion acted as a compelling (if campy) anti-communist manifesto. So it made sense that the script for the 21st century remake once again featured a red menace. As Reagan had since brought the Soviets down, the obvious choice for the new villain was China. There was no chance the movie would play in Beijing as drafted, and after Sony acquired the rights to distribute the film from a bankrupt MGM, it wanted to salvage its chances of scoring release approval from the CCP. This meant completely altering the script that centered on the massive U.S. debt China holds and, with a little dubbing and CGI magic, changing the invading army from Chinese to North Korean. “The filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from ‘Red Dawn,’” the LA Times reported at the time, “substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.
