Posts Tagged ‘Hollywood’
Donald humor
No, not that Donald (although he can be pretty funny).
This one, Donald Fauntleroy Duck, my favourite Disney cartoon character because he was bad-tempered to the point of having massive, unhinged tantrums – which is well captured by this image.
But this post is not about him so much as the voice that made him a real character, courtesy of voice performer Clarence Nash:
Nash’s final performance was in Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), which made Donald the only character in the film to be voiced by his original actor.
And therein lies a tale.
Clarence Nash died in 1985.
P.S. See also the post Job Security
Dem Rangz of Power
Oh Dear. Exactly as expected by Semi-Fascists, Amazon’s new prequel of The Lord of the Rings – titled The Rings of Power, is not going well with audiences:
After 20 minutes of this Lord of the Rings spinoff I’m having flashbacks to that EastEnders episode with the fightin’ villagers and donkeys walking the streets
…
The Scots get it too in The Rings of Power. Stand-ins for the dwarfs, they are portrayed as aggressive and argumentative. It gets to the point where I expect Durin, prince of Khazad-dûm, to whip out a deep-fried Mars bar. Every other “mad Jock” cliche has already been ticked off
With the predictable results, as documented by NotTheBee:
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These fucking morons have learned nothing from the total failure of Star Wars or the massive success of Top Gun: Maverick. The latter movie – which was a pretty simple meat and spuds storyline well executed and acted – is at $1.4 billion+, and with yet another $6 million chart-topping weekend in the bag, more than 12 weeks after its release, is now closing fast on the top ten of all-time box office earners, and that’s without the Chinese market that pushed all the superhero dreck of recent years by a $1 billion each time.
I’ll let The Dark Herald explain why Rings Of Power is such a loser:
You would have to have had the hubris of Morgoth himself to take on this project.
As a writer, I would have been terrified of it. If the producers had come to me to finish the Unfinished Tales by Tolkien plus some original pastiche based on the Appendixes, I would have told them. “Look, I’ll require two years prep time before I write word one. I’ll need to completely immerse myself in Tolkien’s work to the exclusion of all else. Then I have to spend a lot of time with Tom Shippey and other scholars, plus a Catholic priest with three doctorates who is really into JRR’s work. And at the end of the day, it still won’t be Tolkien, just so you know.”
Who would take this on? Bad Reboot that’s who.
The inarticulate slaughterer of every franchise where they press a diseased foot is their bread and butter. Their mode of operation is now predictably obvious. Being completely incapable of creativity themselves, they select anything at all that might have an audience, invade and metastasize, then give it a Bad Reboot treatment. This consists of a Feminist Heroine’s Journey combined with a bunch of mystery boxes to lure foolish audiences along. Be sure to break the bank on flashy effects scenes.
I spent some time in sales, so I can see what Jar Jar Abrams’s school of non-writing is. It is sales technique disguised as writing. That’s it. That is all that the Abrams Mystery Box school really is. It’s just a hook with nothing attached to the hook but the next hook. It’s just one long sales pitch trying to keep you watching despite the fact that there is in fact nothing to watch.
Let me assure you now, there is nothing to watch here.
Amazon have pissed $1 billion up against the wall with this effort and even a company as large and powerful as they are will only tolerate so many failures in one division, as the folks at the various divisions of Warners are discovering, Between the Firing of Brian Stelter and the Cancelation of Batgirl, Warners is Seemingly Ditching Leftism and Wokism
- CNN+ gone just weeks after starting up, losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Multiple CNN “stars” being fired.
- A finished movie, Batgirl, simply trashed after costing $90 million
- Multiple writers and others dumped.
You love to see it.
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Over the Hills and Far Away
Things are getting so bad at Disney that now we’re seeing articles like this one.
Is Disney Setting Up Films To Fail At The Box Office?
Perhaps, but it’s far more likely that their string of box office failures in the last few years are due to the relentless Lefty messaging that bends movies to its will. This is not a phenomenon unique to Disney or even just Hollywood any longer, but also the MSM news, yielding the same results:
…. even the supposedly sober world of finance, witness BlackRock Investments. Or the even more practical world of shipping…
This cartoon sums up the fundamental problem across all these areas.
But some advertising is accurately assessing their target audience.
Including political campaigns. It’s called knowing your audience.
Which is why Lefty Martyn Bradbury is tearing his hair out, although he was in front of the whole pathetic, failed attempt to deflect from the NZ Left’s problems by trying to tie the dumping of Roe to National’s Chris Luxon.
It’s hardly surprising then that these people continue to be gullible
Twitter site Defiant L’s continues to have fun with Leftist double standards, hypocrisy, tone deafness and … sheer lack of self awareness
Apparently the rap artist known as “Snoop Dog” is a big fan of cannabis and has promoted a new premium brand.
Snoop is not the only one trolling “President” Biden.
I’ll leave you with this, one lucky guy.
Roof painter Michael Richard’s miraculous survival was hanging in the balance when he fell from the ground floor roof of a two-storey home. Michael tried to stand up after hitting the ground but struggled, before discovering he had landed on a steel bar that was sticking out of the ground which pierced through his neck and into the back of his skull.
Hollywood – another bubble world
It’s not just the MSM who are living in a bubble, as described in yesterday’s post.
No, it’s also Hollywood and it’s really now right up in the faces of Disney executives in the wake of the huge flop that Disney/Pixar’s latest animated movie, Lightyear, has been.
It has earned just over $50 million in its opening domestic weekend when $100 million+ was expected, with an eventual year-long global target being a billion dollars, like Top Gun: Maverick. Instead, as the article points out, it may actually only make $300 million, meaning it will lose as much as it makes.
I’m past the age when I’d take kids to see movies, but Pixar holds a special place in my heart because of all their Golden Age stuff from 1995 to about 2015. I’d heard something about a “lesbian kiss”, which sounded like a big nothing – and is. But the real story is as follows:
The movie’s narrative revolves around the lesbian couple who become pregnant and have a family — to the point that Buzz Lightyear becomes the villain for attempting to complete the [time travel] mission and thereby (somehow) remove the situation in which the couple could come together. Parents were already going to be thrown for a loop when they needed to explain how two mommies can make a baby, the kiss was just Pixar’s coup maximus.
…
Can I also just say that I find it exceedingly funny that they released a movie that centers around a lesbian couple – and the bad guy is a man who might accidentally erase their relationship… on Father’s Day Weekend.
Geniuses: IN-YOUR-FACE geniuses, because I’m sure that was not a mistake but entirely intentional. A whole storyline that paints Buzz Lightyear as the Evil White Guy trying to break up the cool, interracial lesbian couple! Wow, that’s a twist on the old time-paradox-can-I-correct-past-mistakes concept. It’s a wonder that Pixar didn’t give him an Alabama accent just to underline the message. As that article further points out:
And the only reason they didn’t see this coming is because they’re in such a bubble with who they talk to and where they live that they didn’t even know about the thesis we’ve been presenting here at That Park Place for months. They would have rejected it if they had known, but that they didn’t is enough to show you how insular their lives are.
The cleanup for Disney will be hard. The company is overtaken with a California culture that is wholly separate and distinct from the rest of the country and even most of the western world. What do you do when your studio is filled with people who don’t know how to avoid their core beliefs because their core beliefs are at odds with most of the world?
No company, not even one as big and powerful as Disney, can take successive losses on this scale. Starting with their CEO they’re going to have to crack down on this crap out of sheer financial need. But as noted above, that’s going to be easier said than done given how embedded this all is across both Disney and Pixar.
Disney has lost 8 of it’s top animation directors since Jennifer Lee was made head creative executive there a few years back. She can’t tell a story to save her life, and doesn’t have a creative bone in her body.
Sounds like Kathleen Kennedy’s destruction of the Star Wars franchise. Already there’s another Pixar movie in the pipeline (meaning almost finished), Strange Worlds, that has, as its centerpiece … a romance between two teenage boys.
Yeah. That’ll pack them in.
Even if, by some miracle, they produce a kids animated movie that doesn’t try to pull the same stunts, what parents who refused to take their kids to see Lightyear, are going to trust Disney/Pixar again? The only promotion that might work would be word-of-mouth because nobody will trust the advertising and marketing of carefully edited trailers.
Every entertainment company can produce stinkers of plays, musicals, TV series and films and still survive. But what Disney/Pixar are doing here is stinking up their brands. Business history is littered with examples of outfits that tarnished a brand and could not recover it. Disney is not quite there yet, given their revenue power across multiple entertainment streams, but they’re a lot closer than I ever thought they’d be.
Changing messages on China
A couple of years ago on this blog one commentator complained about my “tiresome China bashing”, the implication being that, as with so many other things, I was not in the middle of the crowd on this issue and needed to get with the program.
Part of this was the argument that Trump’s approach to China had been an aberration and that things would return to the Clinton-Bush-Obama normality of ever-increasing trade between the USA and China, together with ever more involvement of China in the USA across many spheres.
It turns out that it wasn’t just Trump: he was merely one of the first to raise the issue. Since Biden’s election it’s become apparent that the anti-China brigade is bi-partisan between Democrats and the GOP and although not well organised, exists in greater numbers than previously believed.
And it would appear that the feeling is spreading fast in, of all places, Hollywood, with the release of the movie Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s sequel to the massive and iconic 80’s hit movie.
In a 2021 post, Hollywood’s ugly cost of catering to China, I noted a story that had been running since a 2019 trailer for Top Gun: Maverick had shown the Japanese and Taiwanese flags being pulled from Cruise’s 1986 fight jacket so as not to offend the valuable Chinese market. The movie was then held up for two years because of the ongoing pandemic, with Cruise in particular insisting to the production company Paramount, that it not be released to streaming as some other big movies had been.
My, but things have changed in just two years. Apparently the Taiwanese audiences were cheering when they saw this.
That also means this was edited late in post-production, which is not a cheap process even in the era of CGI, and certainly not something you do on a whim. The producers, Paramount, are sending a message:
To the joy of Taiwanese audiences hitting the theaters this week, Top Gun: Maverick features a prominent shot of the Japanese and Taiwanese flags—national symbols that were scrubbed from a 2019 trailer.
The flags were initially replaced by random symbols, drawing sharp criticism as an example of Hollywood caving in to China’s political demands. But in a rare U-turn, which has yet to be explained, they have reappeared in the film’s worldwide release.
“It is unprecedented,” Ho Siu Bun, a film critic in Hong Kong, told VICE World News. “Major film studios have never been shy about pandering to the Chinese market. And even if it is a simple scene, editing is very costly. So no one knows why they changed it back.”
The message was received according to the Wall Street Journal, with no less a reaction than the huge Chinese tech and gaming company Tencent, whose involvement had been an agreement that Paramount had boasted about during production in 2018.
The reason: Tencent executives backed out of the $170 million Paramount Pictures production after they grew concerned that Communist Party officials in Beijing would be angry about the company’s affiliation with a movie celebrating the American military, according to people familiar with the matter.
Association with a pro-American story grew radioactive as relations between the U.S. and China devolved, the people added. The about-face turned “Top Gun: Maverick” from a movie that once symbolized deepening ties between China and Hollywood into a fresh example of the broader tensions forming between the U.S. and China.
Excellent news. Aside from anything else, recent Hollywood blockbusters have bombed in China despite all the groveling and Tencent has lost out on a movie that has already grossed $US 150 million domestically on Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start to summer and the blockbuster movie season. It promises to do huge business in the coming weeks and is already Cruise’s biggest opening weekend in his career.
Sure, you can say that it’s just a movie, but given the way Hollywood so relentlessly followed other American businesses in kowtowing to China, and given the cultural impact and money involved this is perhaps the biggest public signpost to date of changing Western approaches to The Heavenly Kingdom.
Cancel Kulture and the tools it uses.
And one of those tools has been Twitter.
Here’s one way that Cancel Kulture can be made to work, and has worked on a number of people, especially in show business.
It’s quite simple: you just reach back into the past of that person, find something that’s “problematic” by today’s standards – problematic is a great word in that it’s not a direct attack but implies that a problem exists with the target of the word – and use that standard combined with a gathering wildfire of outrage on Social Media, followed by the MSM, to force the target into groveling apologies, most of which don’t work, the target gets de-platformed anyway.
This is what happened to Oscars host and comedian, Kevin Hart, three years ago. That was the end of that high profile job, and pretty much his career. The same stunt has been pulled on nobodies as well, like the young woman who lost her university place when a former high school classmate published an old Tweet of her celebrating getting her drivers licence at the age of 16 by repeating the line of a famous rap song (all the rage with her generation at the time) that included The Word That Can Get You In Trouble (unless you’re a rap artist).
Recently it was tried against the famous American comedian Steve Martin, because of a forty year old sketch he’d done on Saturday Night Live. Stephen Green at PJMedia takes up the story:
“Steve Martin” briefly trended on Monday after Silver Age Television tweeted the anniversary of King Tut’s debut on SNL. It trended because some zero-humor wokester forced it to trend. But only briefly. Mediaite did its best to generate heat with this headline yesterday:
Steven Martin’s ‘King Tut’ Sketch from 1978 Sparks Twitter Debate on Cultural Appropriation.
Steven Martin? Anyway, as the story made clear, there wasn’t even so little as a “Twitter debate.” The worst Mediaite could find was two barely-critical tweets by a couple of low-follower Blue Checks.
The Twitter Outrage Machine was cranked to life, then almost immediately ran out of gas. Maybe it’s because Twitter spent Monday outraged about the Elon Musk buyout and didn’t have time to worry about Martin.
Excellent news, but how did that little wokester actually get “Steve Martin” to trend in the first place, lighting a spark as it were?
“They do it,” Dice explained, “to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. Twitter manually inserts a topic on the list. People see the topic and think everyone is tweeting about which “caused” it to trend, so people *start* tweeting about it, and *then* the issue goes viral.”
Easy peasy. Japaneasy.
Oooo. Is that racist? Or culturally inappropriate?
Well anyway, after delving into yet another aspect of the grim, toxic underbelly of the politically correct Left, have a laugh at Steve Martin’s original sketch:
Hats Off to (Roy) Harper
We’re not quite at the point of being able to not talk about the Chinese Lung Rot virus but it’s getting closer.
In the meantime I saw the claim over on Newshub while checking on today’s death count that, “A good rule of thumb is to wear a mask in indoor public settings as we know that mask use halves the risk of spread of COVID-19″
Well, actually it’s 53% according to that British study that Hipkins keeps referring to, which was not a Randomised Control Trial (the gold standard) but yet another observational study that was immediately pointed out as a claim that could not be made based on its own data. To be fair the authors acknowledged that RCT’s would have to be done. To be unfair fourteen RCT’s already have been done over the years, including one during Covid and the conclusions were that masks were useless against such a virus.
You have to wonder if our journalists even read things like the Washington Post, where even they recently concluded that “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference”, or simply asked how “halving the risk” could be concluded when the case number growth on a chart was almost vertical in NZ, as it was elsewhere. Or looked at something like this:
Perhaps that should have been turned into a t-shirt.
Other data continues to accumulate.
On all aspects of the virus and the vaccination cure. The following is probably just a coincidence, one of those correlation vs. causation questions that pop up all the time in science.
On a different topic this one is a hoot.
If you assume that having a society that’s increasingly tolerant of LGBTQ+ folks is what’s behind the numbers of such people for Gen Z, you’d have to wonder why it’s not lifting the numbers in other generations as people come out of the closet, especially the next closest in time, Millennials. The reason is that Gen Z has been bombarded with this since they were young. The Jesuits once said “give us a child till he’s 7 and we’ll have him for life”, the Libs of TikTok have documented that trans teachers are fanatical about this stuff and…
Can’t.
Stop.
Talking about it.
Maybe that’s Why American Teens Are So Sad:
The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded
With the Disney-Florida shitstorm there was a sudden outburst of people complaining about the Right calling such teachers and their enablers “groomers”. Apparently it’s hurtful and nasty to compare groomers to people who want to talk to small children about sex while keeping that secret from the parents. I appreciated this response, although you have to be familiar with the theory of White Fragility to get it.
I think Disney have chosen poorly,
Especially given that this fight is coming up again, and this time I wouldn’t bet on GOP Senators and members of Congress being quite so friendly to a corporation.
But perhaps Disney doesn’t care about The Mouse anymore:
Disney isn’t for kids anymore. Its movie business is dominated by Marvel blockbusters. Half of Disney+ subscribers, its big bet on the home streaming future, are adults with no children.
What about the theme parks?
60% of Disneyland visitors were adults with no children. Only 36.7% of Disney World visitors had children under 18. The largest demographic for the theme parks, like the movies, are millennials. They are also members of the fandoms who are likeliest to spend money on licensed merchandise, and on toys and movie tie-ins that are Disney’s bread and butter.
The Happiest Place on Earth?
When I was a little boy one of my TV highlights every week was The Wonderful World of Disney.
An hour long program screened on early Sunday evenings, just as it was in the USA, it had everything from classic Disney cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck (my favourite because of his bad temper) and their mates, to documentaries on nature and science (some of them also animated), some of which were hold-overs from earlier days but didn’t seem to suffer for that.
Here’s a classic example from 1958, The Future of Transport, which I came across in falling down Interwebby rabbit holes because of the opening of Transmission Gully.
I doubt my parents ever had a concern about me watching such stuff while they got on with other things. It was Walt Disney after all.
But in the year 2022 I find that Disney has gone woke and as former President Trump said, everything woke turns to shit.
Just the other day I briefly covered Disney’s opposition to some legislation in Florida that prevents teachers from talking about sexual matters with kids aged 4-7. The MSM jumped in as well because GOP Governor Ron DeSantis headed up the bill and has defended it – and is seen as a huge threat to Democrat hopes in the 2024 election, so has endured endless amounts of MSM hit jobs. However, Disney and the MSM are truly on the wrong side of this issue:
The Florida bill doesn’t influence parents on how they, as parents, can instruct their own kindergartener on gender. Parents are still free to tell a child who can’t keep crayons inside the lines that “There are 20 genders.” The vast majority of parents will leave that discussion for when their child isn’t just starting to read Cat in the Hat.
Also, the majority of even Democrats agree with Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature. The general public, by a wide margin, sees no valid reason for a stranger to teach a six-year-old girl that she’s “in the wrong body” and needs to be called a boy. That polling is for the voting Democrats. If pollsters asked just parents, the percentage in favor of allowing children to remain children would skyrocket.
But that has turned out to be the least of it. Journalist Christopher Rufo – who has led the charge against woke poison across the USA in the last two years (and has thus incurred the wrath of the Far Left, who blame him for “creating” this particular culture war) – was sent a recording of an in-house, all-hands-on-deck video meeting that shows just how far gone the company is in its senior management levels. You can check out some of the videos at this link, plus more on Rufo’s own Twitter account, but here’s just one example:
Christ! Is there anybody there in management that’s not gay or trans, with gay and trans kids? Is there any limit to how far those assholes will go in pushing their Far Left woke agenda on everybody else?
Is the point of representation not to be representative? Yet, making 50 percent of [animated] characters some mix of LGBT and minority is not that when looking at the demographics of the country. Rather, it’s purposeful indoctrination that is meant to condition children to certain lifestyle choices these adults approve of and want to promote.
Ironically, in the same meeting, Disney’s “diversity and inclusion manager” then brags about de-gendering all of their theme parks, which is actually erasing representation. In other words, if you are a normal person who embraces the sex you were born with instead of entertaining the delusion it can be changed, you don’t deserve any representation. In fact, you need to be completely erased.
The videos also make it quite clear that their objective is absolutely to condition little kids into LGBT ideology at an age when they still believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy:
Do you know what I’ve never thought about doing? Injecting sexuality into children’s programming in order to reinforce my adult views on the topic. I’ve never thought about that because I’m not a groomer, and I don’t use that word lightly, but really, what else would you call this? “Adding queerness” into shows that small kids watch is the kind of activism that should shock and appall everyone. Children are not pawns to be used in the pushing of adult sexual ideology. Yet, Disney employees like Latoya Raveneau are consumed by the practice.
I’d like to think that Disney is going to take a big hit over this, if not over their ugly, shitty obeisance to the Chinese Communist Party (which didn’t help them financially anyway). What “mother” or “father” will want to take their kids to Disneyland or DisneyWorld now, knowing that it’s less about fun than about ideological sexual indoctrination.
But it’s just another Culture War that can be ignored, correct?
“Celebration Day”
Do we have something to celebrate?
I guess the end of the bullshit vaccine passport or C-19 test checking for Southbound Aucklanders on the Waikato Expressway on Monday this week, counts as something. You have to take your wins where you get them.
I doubt many readers of NM are also on Instagram but for anybody under the age of 30 it’s very much a thing. While working on the agricultural contracting job last year I was astounded at the constant camera-sound from a phone as my Irish workmate “communicated” with friends around the world via an endless stream of selfies while I drove us to our harvesting sites.
Then there are the woman of Instagram, exceeded only in obnoxiousness by those on TikTok. The following captures well what’s really going on with those endless photo streams.
I wonder how many dates and marriages will result from all this, or is it all just hookup culture? I guess we’ll know in a few years via surveys.
Back in the real world, increasingly meaning the old world, there were caches of things more valuable than butt-shots.
Is that stack of $500 notes Confederate money? A DDG search says no, and the same for the Union, so perhaps it’s Mexican? I don’t recognise the dude in the picture. Readers are invited to guess or find out. I suppose whoever planted this stash either died or never found their way back to their hiding place.
Jumping back a century or so is another tale of a hard-living chap.
As Captain Benjamin L. Willard would say: “A Tough Mother Fucker!”
And they’re still around. Looks like Hideaki Akaiwa’s story was real enough for Wikipedia, but I’m surprised I’ve never heard of him despite watching several documentaries on the 2011 Japanese Tsunami, given how often we focus on one person’s story amidst many. The lack of body cam video means it can’t compete with Reality TV!
Then there are these heroes, who managed to be heroes while having fun. MUCH FUN.
I wonder why Ferrari, who I think of as the quintessential Italian sport car, have been beaten out for this role by Lamborghini. Also – given that I doubt even modern developments in automotive technology have changed the Italians that much, in that they still love their manual gear shifts – what must the service costs on these babies be like, given Lamborghini’s history.
More history.
And as a final sop to history there’s the story of the sequel to the semi-famous TV series of the late 1990’s, Sex and The City. I saw glimpses of it from time-to-time because it was truly a chick-flick and I never got what was so great about living the loves and travails of four glamorous mid-30’s White Woman in NYC. Still, a lot of ladies around the world loved the characters and their joys and sorrows, all happening in stunningly fashionable clothes and apartments in the New York City of Rudy Guliani, meaning when it wasn’t a shithole like the 1970’s or today.
As a result these fans, now aged twenty more years, were filled with anticipation for the sequel. Had they known any Star Wars fans they’d have guessed what they were in for.
The show is fucking awful, it’s even getting panned by woke Leftie fans who were wanting more than the original four White-girls world. One writer summed it up pretty well by saying that “the writers clearly hate the characters, hate the show and hate the fans”. They even hated the original name and called this one, And Just Like That, which is hopeless. Who could have done this? Fans investigated and…
Yep. The lead writer is someone who hates the characters, hates the show and hates the fans.
So not a celebration then.
Hollywood’s ugly cost of catering to China
on Maverick’s Jacket for Top Gun II
A terrific article about Hollywood’s pathetic sucking up to China over the last few years.
There’s plenty of evidence in terms of reporting on all the machinations that have been pulled between China and Hollywood over the years at the management level.
But it can be seen on the screen itself: things like modifying Maverick’s jacket to remove the patches for Taiwan and Japan, or Disney’s removal of the Black guy in their Star Wars billboards for China.
The ultimate joke is that it’s started to fail Hollywood anyway as the returns on all this “investment” begin to dry up:
Just two years ago, Disney’s “Avengers Endgame” earned a whopping $629 million at Chinese theaters during its theatrical run.
The far-Left Hollywood Reporter says “Jungle Cruise,” a splashy Disney film with a massive budget, bombed during its opening weekend in China. The film earned a mere $3.3 million during its initial release.
That’s part of a new pattern for U.S.-made films, notes Breitbart News. Other 2021 U.S. titles which significantly under-performed in China include “Snake Eyes,” “Luca” and “Wonder Woman 1984.”
Meanwhile, many films that expected to earn serious coin in China have yet to snag an official release in the country, including “Black Widow,” “The Eternals” and “Shang-Chi,” all Disney titles.
Also aiding this fail is that China has started to get pretty good at churning out big blockbuster movies themselves – and they’re patriotic about China. As a result they’re making a lot of the money Hollywood used to make from Chinese audiences.
The article also links to a short documentary about this, The Iron (Movie) Curtain. As the old Russian soviets once said: The West will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
See also:
No Minister 