Made for Beijing, How the Chinese Market Changed Hollywood Scripts

There is an uncredited name on a number of Hollywood productions, and it does not appear at the end with the gaffers and the caterers. It is the name of an office in Beijing that decides which foreign films may play in the world's second-largest movie market, and which scenes, characters and flags must go before they do. The industry that spends every awards season telling the rest of us about the sacred duty of artists to speak truth to power has, at the box office, learned to ask politely whether it may speak at all.

That is a free-speech problem, and it is not confined to China. It is a problem for every American who buys a ticket, because the movie on the screen in Ohio was shaped, in part, by a censor who is not accountable to anybody in Ohio. Let me lay out the record, state the industry's best defence fairly, and then argue what the studios owe their audience.

The money, and the rules

Start with the mechanics. China has, for many years, limited the number of foreign films that can be released in its theatres each year. In 2012, under an agreement with the United States, that quota was raised from twenty films a year to thirty-four, with the added slots reserved for films in 3D or large-format versions. Even for the films that get in, the censorship rules apply, and the quota creates a strong reason for a studio to make a movie that the censors will approve.

The Chinese government regulates content in its theatres, and the rules include limits on portrayals that the authorities consider damaging to national security, social stability or the country's image. Anything that depicts China or Chinese people in an unflattering light, anything touching Tibet, Taiwan or the leadership, and a good deal besides, is liable to be cut or refused. China is a sovereign country and it may run its theatres as it likes. The question is what American studios do in response, and who pays for it.

Four examples, all well documented, show the pattern.

Example one: Red Dawn, 2012

The original Red Dawn of 1984 was a Cold War adventure in which Soviet and Cuban troops invade the United States and a band of teenagers resists. For the 2012 remake, the studio filmed the story with Chinese forces as the invaders. Then, in post-production, it changed them. The filmmakers used digital effects to alter flags, insignia and references so that the invading army became North Korean instead. The change was reported at the time, and it was widely understood as a response to the risk of offending Chinese regulators and losing access to their market.

Consider what that means. A film about an invasion of the United States, made by an American studio, had its enemy chosen by an anticipated reaction from a foreign government. The villains were not selected by the script, or the history, or the logic of the story. They were selected by a sales projection. There is a certain irony in the change, since North Korea is a country with no access to the American market and no interest in this one, and so a villain nobody could be bothered to be offended by. The producers did, to be fair, make a movie anyway, and I will draw only one moral from it: you cannot please a market you do not respect.

Example two: Doctor Strange, 2016

In the comic books, the Ancient One, the mystic who teaches the hero, was a Tibetan character. In the 2016 film, the role was given to the actress Tilda Swinton and recast as a Celtic figure. The change drew criticism for its handling of race, and the film's screenwriter, C. Robert Cargill, explained in an interview that keeping the character Tibetan would have drawn the film into the debate over Tibetan sovereignty and invited Chinese censorship, and that he also wanted to avoid a stereotype. I give that as his reported explanation and not as a documented studio memo. Other reasons were also offered, and the studio defended the casting on creative grounds.

I am less interested in the casting argument than in the explanation. Here, as in Red Dawn, the stated reason was the sensitivities of a government that has controlled Tibet since the 1950s and does not want the subject raised in a mass-market film. A fictional wizard was reshaped, in the telling, to avoid the existence of a place.

Example three: the Top Gun: Maverick jacket, 2019 and 2022

In the 1986 film Top Gun, Tom Cruise's character wears a leather flight jacket decorated with patches, including flags of Japan and Taiwan. When the first trailer for the sequel appeared in 2019, observers noticed that the jacket was different. The Taiwanese and Japanese flags were missing from the jacket. It was reported that Tencent, a Chinese company, was a financial partner in the picture at that time.

By the time the film was released in 2022, the original patches were back. Whatever the reason for the change of heart, the episode tells you that somebody noticed the problem, that it was fixable, and that the original had been altered in the first place. A detail on a jacket is a small thing. But small things show what the editors are thinking, which is what a foreign government might tolerate.

Example four: the 2020 report

In August 2020, the writers' advocacy group PEN America published a report titled Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing. It reviewed how the Chinese market affects American film, and it described a pattern of studios making cuts, changes and advance accommodations to satisfy Chinese authorities, and of studio executives and filmmakers practising a kind of anticipatory self-censorship, trimming their own work before anyone had asked. The report's authors concluded that the market's influence was reaching into content the American audience sees.

I am not reproducing its findings in detail, and I urge you to read the document yourself. The key point is the one the report made: the most powerful form of censorship is the one that never has to be ordered. When an industry learns what the censor dislikes, it does the job for him.

The steelman: it is only business

Let me state the industry's best defence, in terms its defenders would accept.

A studio is a business. It owes a return to the people who invested in the film. China is a vast market, and a studio that ignored it would be giving up revenue and handing it to competitors. Every film is already a compromise: it is shaped by budgets, ratings boards, test audiences and the tastes of the market. Adjusting a film for a market is as old as the business. Foreign films have always been altered for the American market, and American films have always been dubbed, subtitled and trimmed for other countries. Nobody is forcing American audiences to watch the Chinese cut. And a movie that plays in China may carry American values to people who would otherwise never see them.

That argument has force, and there is a real distinction between making a separate cut for another country and altering the film for everyone.

The answer

Here is where the defence runs out, in numbered points.

1. The edits are not confined to the Chinese version. In the cases above, the change was made to the film itself, as in Red Dawn, and not to a version for export. Americans watched the altered story. If a studio is going to make a Chinese cut, it can do so. If the American cut is shaped by what a foreign government will tolerate, then the censor's reach has extended into the United States.

1. The audience is entitled to know. The viewer who buys a ticket assumes that the story on the screen reflects the choices of the people who made it. If the villain was chosen to avoid offending a foreign ministry, that is information a viewer would want. A studio that cuts a scene for Beijing and says nothing is making a representation about its work that is not quite true.

1. It is a double standard. The same industry that insists that its artists must be free to say anything about American institutions, and that treats any pressure from American officials as an assault on the First Amendment, finds it easy to accommodate pressure from a government that actually jails people for speech. The consistency of principle is not high. An industry that has its courage on call, depending on who is asking, does not have courage.

1. It is a security and influence problem. A foreign government that can shape the content of mass entertainment has found a cheap way to shape how Americans see the world. That is soft power, working in reverse. I discussed a related case in The NBA and China in 2019 and the Week a Tweet Cost a League Its Voice, where a single tweet showed how far the commercial reach of the Chinese market had extended into American speech.

1. The market logic cuts both ways. If American audiences value a studio's willingness to tell the truth, then the price of silence is borne by the studio over time. The audience in America is not small, and it is not forgiving.

The constitutional angle, and its limits

Let me be careful here, because conservatives should not call for the government to dictate what a studio may put in a film. The First Amendment protects a studio's right to make the movie it wants, and that includes its right to make a movie that pleases Beijing. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" is a command against the government, and it applies to every film.

So I am not proposing a federal Office of Movie Villains. I am saying that a studio's free choice has consequences, and that the audience has a right to respond to them, with its ticket money and with its opinion. Free speech works in both directions. The studio is free to alter its movie for a foreign censor. The public is free to say what it thinks of that.

There is a place for law in a different corner of this. The government has a legitimate interest in transparency about foreign influence over American media, and a case can be made that significant foreign financing and content approval should be disclosed to the public in some form. I would want to see such a proposal drawn with care, because disclosure requirements can themselves burden speech. But the principle that the public should know who is shaping what it watches is not an unreasonable one. For a closely related clash between free speech and national security, see TikTok v. Garland and the Hard Clash of Free Speech and National Security.

What studios owe audiences

If I were writing the rules, which I am not, here is the short list.

• A single American cut. Make the version for American theatres the way the filmmakers want it. If a foreign market wants a different version, label it as such, and keep the original intact.
• Honest disclosure. If an edit was made at the request of a foreign authority, say so, in the credits or the press notes.
• No pre-emptive surrender. Do not rewrite a villain, a flag or a setting on the strength of a guess about what a censor might say. If the market will not take the film as it is, that is a business decision, and the audience deserves to know that it was made.
• A little courage. A studio that is willing to lose a market over a principle will find that the principle is worth something. A studio that is not will find that it has nothing to sell but the market.

It is worth remembering what Hollywood once was. In 1942, as I recounted in When Hollywood Enlisted, the Studios and Stars Who Went to War in 1942, the industry looked at a dangerous world and decided it was part of America. The question for the industry now is whether it still thinks so, or whether it has begun to answer to a different set of customers. And if you want evidence that the American audience is still there, ready to reward a film that respects it, I made that case in Movies That Love America Still Sell Tickets, and Hollywood Keeps Forgetting.

The case in brief

1. China limits foreign films and censors their content, and it is entitled to run its own theatres.
2. American studios have altered films to please that market, as in the 2012 Red Dawn remake, the casting of the Ancient One in Doctor Strange and the jacket patches in the 2019 Top Gun: Maverick trailer.
3. The 2020 PEN America report documented anticipatory self-censorship across the industry.
4. The edits reach American audiences, so this is an American free-speech problem, not only a business choice.
5. Studios owe their audiences one honest American cut, disclosure of foreign-driven changes and a spine.

What you can do: before you buy a ticket for a big-budget film, search for whether the studio made changes for a foreign market, and tell your local theatre or the studio, politely, that it matters to you.