Hollywood's true influencer: Why China may never be the villain in Tinseltown again

The Wall Street Journal's Erich Schwartzel shares how China exerts its influence on Hollywood, and why it is so difficult for actors, writers, and producers to make content critical of the Chinese government in the latest episode of "The Ben Domenech Podcast" on Fox News Audio:

ERICH SCHWARTZEL: For moviegoers of our generation, you're right, the original "Red Dawn" has a really special resonance, you know, and it's an interesting movie to return to these days. I call that era in the book the era of "Rah-Rah!" cinema, where you had, as you said, a lot of movies kind of implicitly or explicitly exploring Cold War themes and showing America victorious over Soviet forces, whether it was "Rambo" or "Rocky" or the teenagers in "Red Dawn." And the movie from 1984, as you said, had this kind of special resonance. And so when MGM in 2009 wanted to look for possible reboots, it ("Red Dawn") seemed like an obvious choice. And not only that, but casting China as the villain was the obvious choice. 

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I mean, think about it … Russia in 2009 didn't make sense as an invading force. China was really the only superpower that seemed like a plausible option. And also at the time – I think this is right after the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and it's also right after the financial crisis of 2009, where we start to see kind of the early indications of some kind of ascendancy and maybe some kind of decline in America's standing in the world. And so when MGM hired a couple of screenwriters to give a pass to a "Red Dawn" reboot, they said, yeah, go ahead [and] write it as a Chinese scenario. 

And what's fascinating is one of the screenwriters came up with a scenario that really seems quite prescient today, which involves China invading Taiwan, forcing a U.S. response, and then dumping a lot of U.S. debt that sends the American economy into a tailspin. I mean, he wrote this in 2009, and it sounds like prognostications that some people have today. 

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And so they filmed the movie. Chris Hemsworth is in it. It's, you know, I have to say – I'm not going to say it should have won every Oscar, but it's a fun, you know, teenagers-with-guns movie about China invading the U.S. 

But between the time that the movie was put into production and it was ready for release, something very important happened, which is that China's box office started to grow very, very fast and America's box office started to stagnate. So it didn't exactly take a Harvard MBA to realize if you were running a studio, and you wanted to target growth, you had to appease China and get your movies into China. And whenever Chinese authorities heard about this remake of "Red Dawn," they started putting articles in state-run media saying that this was, you know, a bad move on Hollywood's part and that MGM would be punished if the film came out. 

And so the studio did something really extraordinary. Before releasing the film, they hired a visual effects company to go in and frame-by-frame change the villain from China to North Korea. So, in the finished product, [in] the movie that was released in theaters, it is a North Korean invasion of America, not a Chinese one. And the way I talk to the visual effects workers who had to do this, I mean, and a lot of them were just really nice guys who I think woke up one day and found themselves in the middle of an international incident. And they said it was just a nightmare … It was more than just a copy and paste operation. You really had to overhaul the esthetic of the entire film.

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And then, of course, the cruel irony is that today, North Korea wouldn't even be an option because I think studios would be concerned about being hacked, as Sony was a few years later when they made a critical film of North Korea. But at the time, it was the only way to get the movie released. And still, a decade later, we have not had a movie put into production by a major Hollywood studio and have China cast as the villain. 

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