well, we can't say for certain, because china just doesn't tell us. but it almost certainly has as much to do with us/china diplomatic tensions as it does with shang-chi's depictions.
as of right now, no way home does not have a release scheduled, & eternals hasn't received one either (forgot to mention that above - speaks to how memorable that film is, i guess!).
china at this point has cut down on us/hollywood releases (see article below).
if that's just some temporary sword rattling, and things resume as they were in a year or two, then maybe nothing changes.
but if china is off the table for these films permanently, then that may change the strategy for these big films that play across all these nations. maybe.
wouldn't be a bad thing necessarily. it might result in large movies that perhaps aren't quite so formulaic, though that's probably just fantastical thinking on my part.
& i say that as a guy who generally loves the mcu and has no way home tickets for next friday.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/spider-man-china-movie-theaters-1235059555/
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Techto (1148)
2 years ago
China only admits a couple of dozen Hollywood films each year anyway. No film producer can be assured of getting their film picked up there unless they have a Chinese partner. If China should become more restrictive, the studios will just recalibrate their budgets.
The silver lining for the test of the world would be that the Hollywood studios no longer feel obliged to kowtow to the CCP or add extraneous Chinese characters, subplots and product placements to their movies.
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alienzen (1929)
2 years ago
Nah, it's definitely a thing specifically targeted at Marvel. Black Widow had the "little girls are a resource that the world has too much of" theme which was probably prickly for China because of the one child policy they had, Simu Liu and Chloe Zhao both said things that the China government didn't like. Not releasing Spider-man and Venom made no sense.
All of these movies got a China release:
F9
No Time to Die
A Quiet Place Part II
Free Guy
Jungle Cruise
Godzilla versus Kong
Dune
Those are all of the top movies at the US box office that are not Marvel films, except for Ghostbusters:Afterlife. By the end of the year 5 of the top 6 movies will be Marvel movies, and not a single one got a China release, but every single other one of those films did. It's not a Hollywood thing, it's a Marvel thing.
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[deleted]
2 years ago
you're absolutely right about liu & zhao. i think zhao's comments in particular were major triggers for the chinese gov't. that detail completely fell out of my head. thanks for reminding me.
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