‘China Has Ghosted Hollywood’: How the Fallout Will Affect the Film Industry
variety.comRebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterAt some point in the past decade, Hollywood stopped looking at the burgeoning Chinese box office as found money and instead embraced the theatrical market’s windfall for what it has become: a necessity.Today, whether or not blockbuster plays in China could mean the difference between hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales.
That reality is downright painful at a time when China has continued to deny releases for Hollywood’s biggest 2021 movies, such as Disney’s “Black Widow,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Eternals,” as well as Sony’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.” And the few films that were given access to Chinese movie theaters, including MGM’s James Bond sequel “No Time to Die” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” remake, earned far less than their studios had expected.
China has always been strict about the number of foreign films it allows to screen across the country’s thousands of venues.
But recently, there has been increased ambiguity about why the world’s largest theatrical market has all but closed the door on U.S.
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