Greedy America: Hollywood Is Paying an ‘Abominable’ Price for China Access

A kid’s movie has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for DreamWorks.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN 

A scene from "Abominable" taken in a theater and shared by Vietnamese media. 

Hollywood’s China reckoning has come. 

But unlike the NBA’s recent China debacle, this time it’s not the United States but China’s nearest neighbors who’ve had enough.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia have all expressed outrage at a map of China that flickers across the screen in a new film released in late September. 

The animated film, Abominable, is a joint production of DreamWorks and Pearl Studios, which is based in Shanghai. 

The map includes China’s infamous “nine-dash line”—the vague, ambiguously marked demarcation line for its territorial claim over most of the Vietnam East Sea.
The dispute points to a new problem for Hollywood as studios move closer to Beijing’s positions. Silence on China is nothing new—but positively pushing the Chinese government’s view of the world is.
Hollywood’s traditional self-censorship on China has market roots. 

China’s burgeoning market of movie-goers is expected to soon surpass the United States as the largest in the world. 

China’s censors have wielded this power adroitly, mandating that production companies abide by the party’s bottom lines in order to earn one of the 34 coveted spots allotted to foreign films for distribution in China each year. 

That has resulted in a deafening silence from Hollywood on the realities of Chinese Communist Party rule.
In the 1990s, several Hollywood films depicted oppression in Tibet, such as Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, and the Tibetan cause was popular among celebrities, most notably Richard Gere. 

But there hasn’t been a major film sympathetic towards Tibet since Disney’s 1997 film Kundun, for which Disney CEO Michael Eisner flew to Beijing to apologize to the Chinese leadership. 

Gere claims he has been frozen out of major films for his Tibet activism. 

The 2013 zombie movie World War Z altered the location of the origin of the zombie outbreak from China to North Korea. 

The 2016 film Doctor Strange changed the “Ancient One,” a Tibetan character in the original comic book series, to a white character played by Tilda Swinton. 

In the past decade, no major film has portrayed China as a military foe of the United States.
Omitting offending plot lines and characters was once enough to satisfy Chinese censors. 

But pressure has grown to include proactively positive depictions, particularly of Chinese science and military capabilities.
O. In the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Chinese military swoops in to save the day. One film critic described Age of Extinction as “a very patriotic film. It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.” 

The payoff was enormous; Age of Extinction became the highest-grossing film of all time in China, raking in more than $300 million. (It no longer holds that record.) 

China saved the day again in The Martian, the 2015 science fiction film starring Matt Damon. 

NASA launches a special rocket carrying food for an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, but it explodes and NASA is out of options—until China’s space agency jumps into the plot out of nowhere, announcing it also has a special rocket it is willing to lend the Americans. (In fairness, the subplot was present in the original novel, not just introduced by the studio.) 

The Martian brought in $95 million at the Chinese box office.
The growing phenomenon of U.S.-China joint movie productions has also resulted in a proliferation of mediocre films that cast China in a conspicuously positive light. 

The 2018 B-grade shark flick The Meg, co-starring Chinese actor Li Bingbing, was one such coproduction. 

It features an American billionaire who finances a futuristic ocean research station located, in a narrative non sequitur, off the coast of China, run by brilliant and heroic Chinese protagonists.
Abominable appears to be another. 

It features a young Chinese girl who discovers a yeti on her roof. 

She decides to help the yeti find his way back home to the snowy mountains in the west, and they set off on a trek across China. 

It has gotten middling reviews: One critic wrote that the film is “so distinctive pictorially, and so manifestly good-hearted, that it’s easy to forgive if not quite forget the ragged quality of its storyline.”
But the Chinese government’s heavy-handed film regulation department seems to have gone a bridge too far. 

One scene in the movie includes a map of China on the young female protagonist’s wall. 

Nine slim dashes trace a U-shape around the Vietnam East Sea, a resource-rich body of water with numerous land features also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brunei.
China is the only country that recognizes this fallacious map. 

The nine-dash line has no basis in international law, which does not recognize any country’s sovereignty over open waters. 

In 2016, an international tribunal in the Hague also rejected China’s assertions of sovereignty over the Vietnam East Sea. 

Beijing has never clarified the line’s legal definition or even its precise location, likely because to do so would open its vague claims up to further legal challenge.
These issues will come into sharper focus as Beijing begins to demand positive submission, not just omission. 

China’s domestic film market has already shifted from censorship to forced inclusion of propaganda. 

Last year, as part of a sweeping reorganization that saw many Chinese Communist Party bureaus absorb the purview of government departments, the party’s propaganda office took over regulation of the film industry. 

The result has been even more heavy-handed censorship and more overtly patriotic content in films. Over the summer, six anticipated blockbusters were axed entirely, and China’s box office slumped.

Vietnam East Sea

Beijing-Backed DreamWorks Film ‘Abominable’ Is Pulled by Vietnam Over Chinese Map Scene

The animated movie shows China’s disputed “nine-dash line” in the Vietnam East Sea, which includes territory claimed by Vietnam and other countries.

By Daniel Victor

A promotional poster for "Abominable" being taken down in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Monday.

HONG KONG — The news media in Vietnam reported on Monday that the authorities had pulled “Abominable,” a Beijing-backed DreamWorks animated film about a Chinese girl who befriends a yeti, from theaters over a scene that shows a map of China. 

The map includes China’s so-called nine-dash line, which dips far down into the Vietnam East Sea — an audacious and hotly disputed claim to territory that Vietnam and other countries say is theirs.
The image was enough to cause Vietnam’s largest theater chain to apologize for showing it, and for government officials to say they were reviewing the movie.
“Right now we are reinspecting the film,” said Tran Thanh Hiep, chairman of Vietnam’s national film evaluation council, according to Tuoi Tre, a state-run newspaper. 

“If there are any errors, I am ready to accept responsibility.”
The film was co-produced by DreamWorks Animation, which is owned by Comcast, and Pearl Studio, a Chinese production studio based in Shanghai.

Though the plot of “Abominable” has little to do with Chinese international relations, the appearance of the nine-dash line amounted to a political statement. 

The governments of Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all claim territory inside the line, but China has aggressively defended what it considers its territory. 

China, which has made the claim since the 1940s, has in recent years built islands there, installing runways and other infrastructure on some of them, and it has used its military to patrol the waters.
The episode comes amid a broader discussion of China’s impact on the entertainment and sports industries, as international businesses ensure that they do not offend the Chinese government’s sensibilities. 

American greed

Hollywood studios have pre-emptively ensured that their scripts did not cross China’s censors, lest they lose access to a country where moviegoers spent an estimated $8.87 billion on movie tickets last year, according to box office analysts.
The costs of crossing China are clear. “South Park” was erased from China’s internet last week after it mocked Chinese censors and American businesses’ accommodation of them (one of its cartoon children remarked that “we live in a time when the only movies that us American kids go see are the ones that are approved by China”).
The N.B.A. scrambled to control damage last week after Daryl Morey, an executive for the Houston Rockets, posted on Twitter in support of the protesters in Hong Kong. 

The league was forced to balance its professed belief in free speech with an angry Chinese fan base; the fallout continued on Monday when LeBron James, its leading superstar, called Mr. Morey “misinformed” on the subject.
While covering the China-N.B.A. affair, ESPN was criticized last week after including the nine-dash line in an on-screen graphic.