A recent report from NPR details both the effects and the concerns of a growing movie marketplace in China, where government censors aim to bring positive portrayals of the country and its citizens to audiences watching movies within its borders. NPR’s Frank Langfitt describes a scene from Mission: Impossible III, which shows Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) walking past the bright lights of Shanghai’s cityscape and then past underwear hanging from a clothesline. The scene serves to establish the setting, but you won’t find it in the Chinese cut of the film.
“The censors felt that it did not portray Shanghai in a positive light,” says T.J. Green, CEO of Apex Entertainment, which owns and builds theaters in China. “So that scene was removed from the movie.” The erasure of this scene is just one example of many over the course of the last decade or so. If you’ll recall, several scenes were removed from Skyfall when that film arrived on Chinese shores, including one where an assassin kills a Chinese security guard in a Shanghai skyscraper. Some 40 minutes were cut from Cloud Atlas, too, namely violence, nudity, and homosexual love scenes between two male characters that violated the Chinese government’s strict ban on homosexual content.
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Of course, these three films are far from the only ones to receive such treatment. As Langfitt notes, the violent oppressor nation in the 2012 remake of Red Dawn was changed from China to North Korea in post-production. Peter Shiao, who runs a film production and financing company called Orb Media Group, was asked by Chinese diplomats to arrange a meeting with the filmmakers to discuss its portrayal of their country. Transformers: Age of Extinction, on the other hand, features prominent Chinese product placement as its way to earn the approval of Chinese censors.
Then there are movies like Looper and Iron Man 3, the former of which shifted the location of its international scenes from Paris to Shanghai and the latter of which added a scene featuring prominent Chinese actors to help draw in Chinese audiences, which you can watch below. Both films received financing help from DMG, an entertainment firm located in Beijing, which likely helped convince filmmakers to make those changes.
Green estimates the Chinese film market will overtake the North American market in the next few years, though it could happen even sooner than expected, and with that market power comes leverage for the Chinese government to pick and choose which films its audiences can and cannot see. Too much leverage, according to Ying Zhu, a Shanghai-born media culture professor at the City University of New York. Zhu’s biggest concern is the power housed by China’s Communist Party will only continue to increase, and in turn films made just a couple decades ago — particularly those critical of the Chinese government or its people — aren’t likely to receive financing in today’s landscape.
Shiao makes an interesting counterpoint however, stating, “The things that we can see on screen in China right now versus what was allowable ten years ago is very, very different.” He thinks the growing sophistication of Chinese audiences’ tastes will cause them to demand better movies, not just the ones their government censors allow them to see. How might this happen? Langfitt notes:
Unlike the United States, China doesn’t have a movie-rating system. So the government relies on censors at the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China — SAPPRFT — to block content it deems offensive for general audiences. What officials find offensive can extend beyond sex, violence and foul language to politics, culture and portrayals of China.
His report comes on the heels of news out of Cannes earlier this week, in which The Hollywood Reporter states China is getting closer to establishing a film classification system of its own, a move that would bring clarity to the censorship system described above and currently used by the government.
China’s Film Distribution and Exhibition Association, an industry body, has submitted a plan to the Film Bureau, which is part of SAPPRFT. In response, SAPPRFT passed the plan on to the publicity department of the Chinese government. If approved, this would set the stage for a ratings system in China, making it easier for studios and filmmakers to know what is and isn’t allowed if they want their movies to find a place in the world’s second-largest film markets, not to mention one of its fastest-growing. Whether that plan would lead to looser content restrictions, however, is among the biggest questions.
Many in the Chinese film industry believe a documented and reliable ratings system would allow more leeway in terms of censorship, providing filmmakers within its borders the opportunity to make better movies and filmmakers outside its walls a chance to release their films in the country the way they want them to be seen. Given the Chinese market is likely to rake in well over $5 billion in box office receipts this year, it’ll be interesting to see what happens moving forward.
