Around 2012, Hollywood producers started thinking about “Chinese elements.” They had already learned what to remove from a movie to avoid angering China, but now they were asking a recurring question each time a new idea was pitched: How can we work China into this?
With Chinese box-office riches in mind, they began stuffing characters, scenes, and products they thought would appeal to Chinese audiences into their films. It made sense, since sizable returns from China were becoming the norm. At Disney, The Avengers made $86 million in China. At Warner Bros., The Hobbit made $50 million. At Fox, an Ice Age sequel made $68 million. At Universal, Battleship made $48 million.
Michael Bay wanted to share in the bounty. As the director of Paramount Pictures’ biggest franchise, Transformers, he was responsible for the only series the studio had that could go head-to-head with the Avengers and Spidermen of the world. Transformers had been the third-highest-grossing movie of 2007, at $319 million. It collected an additional $390 million abroad — with a respectable $36 million coming in from China. Then the sequel machine started up, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen came two years later: $402 million in the U.S., $434 million abroad — including $66 million from China. Transformers: Dark of the Moon followed that — a dip domestically, with $352 million, but a huge boost abroad: $771 million. Of that total, an eye-popping $165 million came from China, nearly tripling its predecessor’s performance.
Chinese audiences had been showing up to see the special-effects spectacles that Hollywood specialized in, but Transformers struck a deeper chord: the original Japanese Transformers cartoon had been one of the few imported entertainment options available in the country in the 1980s. “These are our superheroes,” middle-aged Chinese men would tell Bay.
It was easy to see where the trajectory of the franchise needed to go, as Americans grew fatigued but more Chinese moviegoers kept showing up. For Bay, preserving that Chinese box-office growth was essential to his bottom line. His contract stipulated that he received a percentage of all ticket sales, and China’s box office was necessary for it to cross the symbolically important $1 billion mark.
He had reason to wonder whether the country would allow it to happen. Though the grosses were rising, China was not making it easy to export a movie and watch the money roll in. In addition to blacking out popular moviegoing seasons and abruptly pulling top-performing titles from screens, officials’ protectionist measures included “stacking” Hollywood movies atop one another, releasing them on the same day so they cannibalized one another’s grosses. It appeared to be yet another ploy that ensured that Hollywood movies never accounted for more than half the country’s annual grosses and therefore that it never looked to the world as though Chinese citizens preferred Western entertainment over their country’s own.
If China decided his next Transformers movie — to be called Age of Extinction — would open on top of another major Hollywood release, it would inevitably underperform relative to the last installment. Distribution executives had learned the consequences of this trick when two of Hollywood’s biggest releases in 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, were both to be released in China on August 28, 2012. Both movies ended up trailing other Hollywood imports that they were expected to outperform. It was a “who, us?” strategy that Chinese officials could explain as a simple coincidence.
Rob Moore, then Paramount’s vice chairman, shared Bay’s concern. Moore had a reputation as an entertainment executive drawn to the industry not by a love of the movies but by a love of power, and he was such a micromanager on the Paramount lot that colleagues joked that he even valeted cars. His studio was struggling, and Moore thought that an edge in China might give Paramount an advantage among the six major studios in Los Angeles. Some of his counterparts still treated the Chinese box office as found money they need not chase too hard. But Moore reasoned that the makers of any movie with a budget of $80 million or greater — that is, any movie that was a priority for the studio — should not only avoid creative choices that jeopardized a theatrical run there but also consider making overt choices that could draw in bigger Chinese audiences.
Transformers was the best chance he had. Paramount, once known for producing Hollywood classics like The Godfather and Chinatown, was withering as a division of Viacom Inc., a media conglomerate that also included movie theaters, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and MTV. Transformers was one of the few billion-dollar assets Paramount had to offer to the corporate overlords.
Moore needed to keep the franchise upswing going — a bigger world-wide gross with each installment. He also needed to keep his director happy. Together, the men would devise a strategy for Transformers to hold special appeal for Chinese audiences and authorities. If Red Dawn was the extreme example of a Hollywood studio anticipating China’s concerns and removing parts of a movie that might anger officials, Transformers became the opposite: a kind of reverse censorship in which a studio would stuff as many “Chinese elements” into a script as possible in the hope that it would appeal to bureaucrats and audiences there.
For the first time since Hollywood’s founding, creative decisions at the root level of moviemaking — casting, story lines, and dialogue — were being made with China, not America, first in mind.
‘THE PACIFIC RIM PROBLEM’
Before a movie goes into production, top-ranking studio executives gather for their most important task: the “green light” meeting.
Finances for the project are scrutinized — not only the budget required to make the film but also what accountants can expect it to gross in every major market, based on similar movies that have come before. These projections are later used to judge whether the movie succeeded or failed — and in the eyes of corporate parents, whether the executive who approved it with such finances in mind made a good call. For movies with large budgets, like Transformers, the expected Chinese box-office gross is usually included, even if its release in China isn’t guaranteed until the movie is completed and approved by Chinese censors.
What Moore needed more than anything, then, was certainty — certainty that the movie would be released in China and certainty that its release date would be optimal. Once Paramount executives had as much of a guarantee as possible that their movie would get into China on a preferred date, they could begin pursuing partnerships and deals that boosted their chances of drawing millions of Chinese moviegoers to the theater. Without a guaranteed release date, it became difficult to secure tie-in deals to splash movie characters onto concession-stand cups or manufacture Happy Meal toys.
There was only one place to go that would promise such certainty.
What Moore needed more than anything, then, was certainty — certainty that the movie would be released in China and certainty that its release date would be optimal… There was only one place to go that would promise such certainty.
In a massive meeting room near the Forbidden City, Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, sat next to Tong Gang, the vice minister of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television of the People’s Republic of China. The rest of the Transformers team filled one side of the table and a row of more Chinese officials lined the other. The Chinese officials had already read the script and listened through translators as Bay gave more detail on the plot of his fourth Transformers. They had heard of the movie’s hero, Cade Yeager, an overprotective Texas dad who tinkered in his garage and policed the length of his daughter’s shorts until one day he acquired a beat-up pickup truck that was actually Optimus Prime (the hero of the robot army) and became a soldier in an intergalactic war.
Bay hadn’t even outlined how this purchase dragged Yeager into the robot war — or even how the movie’s action would shift to China in the second half — when the officials cut him off. They had heard enough and wanted a deal. Their enthusiasm was about not only the plot, Moore realized, but also the benefits accrued to both sides if a deal came together. The success of previous installments made it an economic no-brainer. Age of Extinction would not be an official co-production between the two countries but a new model that afforded Paramount perks in exchange for filming in China and signing partnerships with Chinese companies.
There was only one thing standing in the way of final approval. There was a scene toward the end of the film when Hong Kong is getting demolished in robot warfare. The heroes are down when Optimus Prime and the Americans arrive to save the day in the nick of time. The movie would be better, the film bureau said, if China’s good guys showed up first instead. Beijing, and not the U.S., would rush to rescue Hong Kong.
This never happens, Moore thought to himself. From The Day the Earth Stood Still to War of the Worlds, American screenwriters have made sure Americans are called in no matter where first contact is made or the giant robots have landed. But why did that have to be the case here? he considered. The Beijing fighter jets would be physically closer to Hong Kong, for one thing. No one watching the movie will be like, “What just happened?” Moore thought to himself. For the people he wanted to do business with, he sensed it was about “showing that image — that there are other countries that care about protecting you.” That was more important to China’s leaders than a slight tweak in a script was to him, especially one that made logical sense. New dialogue was written, a scene was added, and Paramount got its release date.
Sensitivities about Hollywood’s portrayal of China’s military had been brewing. While Age of Extinction was filming in the summer of 2013, another robot spectacular was released: Pacific Rim. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it starred Charlie Hunnam and Idris Elba as soldiers fighting a war in the Pacific with gigantic sea monsters. The movie has since become a critical favorite for its homage to Japanese filmmaking, but American audiences didn’t take to it. Pacific Rim made only $102 million in North America. In China, however, it was an immediate hit, opening to $45 million, a record for Warner Bros. Subsequent weeks were equally successful, and the movie had crossed the $100 million mark when a very important critic weighed in.
In a piece published by the People’s Liberation Army Daily, a Communist Party officer named Zhang Jieli warned his countrymen that Pacific Rim was American propaganda designed to “[export] the U.S.’s rebalancing of its Asia-Pacific strategy.” At the end of the film, when the soldiers take on the sea monsters in the coastal waters adjacent to Hong Kong, “the intention was to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to maintaining stability in the Asia-Pacific area and saving mankind.” The choice to set a battle in the South China Sea — and then allow America to emerge victorious — was deliberate, he wrote, a big-budget effort to show the West winning in the disputed region where China’s trade routes and sovereignty meet to become one of its most fiercely protected borders.
“Soldiers should sharpen their eyes and enforce a ‘firewall’ to avoid ideological erosion when watching American movies,” Zhang wrote.
Inside Hollywood, Pacific Rim was one of a handful of movies around this time that were performing better in China than in the U.S., the first signs of a balance in power shifting. But Zhang’s editorial made it clear that the country’s officials still watched every movie through a political lens. Chinese officials would mention the Pacific Rim problem to the executives behind Transformers, a casual aside that ensured they knew not to make the same mistake.
ONE, GLOBAL VERSION
Of all the “Chinese elements,” the most popular form among Hollywood producers quickly became the Chinese actor hired for the American movie. Massive stars in their home country, these actors were largely unknown to U.S. audiences, but studios cast them in their biggest franchises, hoping the familiar faces would pull in crowds.
In 2013, Fan Bingbing, one of the most ambitious stars in China, was tapped by Disney to sell Iron Man 3 to the country. An additional four minutes of footage was added to the movie, and Fan’s big moment came in a scene opposite Wang Xueqi, a Chinese actor hired to play a doctor who rescues Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) after he is injured. The doctor’s assistant, played by Fan, retrieves the surgeon just as he happens to pour himself a glass of Gu Li Duo, a drink produced by Yili, a Mongolian manufacturer that was on an image rehabilitation campaign after distributing milk formula with elevated levels of mercury the year before the film’s release. The doctor treats Iron Man with a combination of Western surgery and Eastern acupuncture, and the hero is saved. In the middle of this otherwise ordinary American superhero movie, China had a cameo — as a place of world-class doctors, beautiful actresses and safe milk.
Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, thought it would be obvious to any American viewer that the filmmakers were pandering to another country, and the scene was only approved for release in the Chinese edit. Chinese audiences, he figured, were the ones who wanted to see their stars on the big screen. He was wrong.
The scenes of Iron Man with his Chinese saviors were not agreed to by Chinese officials so their own people would feel included in a global blockbuster. They were agreed to so audiences outside China would see the country in a new light. Any thrill that a moviegoer in Guangzhou might have in seeing Fan Bingbing alongside Robert Downey Jr. was unimportant compared with the imprimatur of first-world-nation status granted by having the country play a heroic role in an American movie’s plot. When word spread of the two-version solution, Chinese partners on the movie and fans on social media responded in outrage.
Feige and his team prioritized the integrity of the American cut over the economic concerns of angering Chinese audiences. But their mistake was well timed for the Paramount team on Transformers. Officials sent word to the producers: there must be only one global version of Age of Extinction.
The final movie went on to dedicate significant screentime to its Chinese subplots. Roughly a third of Age of Extinction trades the cornfields of Texas, where a light never stops shining on the American flag in Cade Yeager’s garage, for the cityscapes of Hong Kong and mainland China.
The strategy worked. When it was released in the U.S., Age of Extinction followed the trend of diminishing domestic returns, eventually grossing a franchise-low $245 million. But thanks to full auditoriums in China, the movie set an opening-weekend record, collecting $92 million. Chinese exhibitors showed Age of Extinction on up to 70 percent of their screens, putting the movie on its way toward a new record for the country: $301 million. That was more than it made in the U.S. and more than any Hollywood movie had ever made in China. Farmers in Shandong Province began finding spare car parts of their own and constructing 52-foot-tall Transformer replicas, sold as public sculptures for $16,000 apiece.
Most important for Moore and the Paramount executives pleasing their corporate bosses, Viacom would report its quarterly earnings a few months later, and revenue for the studio would rise 12 percent on the strength of the Transformers performance, driving the parent company to a record profit.
Most important for those officials in the Forbidden City, the movie’s global haul of $1.1 billion meant that millions of moviegoers around the world watched Beijing’s heroism.
‘SNEAK PREVIEW’
If Transformers: Age of Extinction represented a pinnacle of sorts for Hollywood in China, it’s been a rockier road since. In 2014, the year Transformers was released, five of the top ten highest-grossing movies in China were from Hollywood. In 2017, three were. In 2019, two were.
One of the people with a front row seat to this change has been Sophia Shek, a Hong Kong filmmaker who had been an assistant director on Age of Extinction. I caught up with her in the summer of 2020. Beijing had recently passed a national security law that made dissent illegal in Hong Kong, turning the activism that had defined the city’s streets and character in recent months into offenses punishable by up to a lifetime in jail.
I asked her about the scene that Paramount executives had rewritten at the request of Chinese authorities. In that scene, Hong Kong officials watch in terror as skyscrapers crumble around them. With their city on the brink of total annihilation, they arrive at only one solution.
“We’ve got to call the central government for help!” one of them proclaims.
Cut to a hotel in Beijing, where the Chinese minister of defense is told that “there’s a crisis in Hong Kong.”
The defense minister is resolute: “The central government will protect Hong Kong at all costs. We have fighter jets on the way.”
The defense minister is resolute: “The central government will protect Hong Kong at all costs. We have fighter jets on the way.”
In the Transformers universe on-screen, as in the world China wanted to will into existence off-screen, Hong Kong officials know there is only one logical place to go for protection. As she sat in the theater, Shek says she realized she had been working on “one of the first films that made Hong Kong completely a part of China. . . . It was the whole package.”
To Shek and her friends, Transformers now feels like a sneak preview, an unlikely vehicle in an escalating campaign of aggression. Rob Moore and the other Paramount executives who had approved the scene were fired or left the studio years before that motivation came into focus on the streets of Hong Kong. It felt like another reminder of a maxim passed through Hollywood: American studios think in stock market quarters. China thinks in centuries.
Shek told me she feared a loss of the strong identity that once defined Hong Kong filmmaking, and she worried about a censorship board being installed that would operate like the one in Beijing. “There’s an urgency to document as much of Hong Kong as possible,” she said.
Less than a year later, the Hong Kong government announced it would ban films it believed were undermining national security and called on officials reviewing movies to “safeguard the sovereignty, unification, and territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China.” Shek’s fears were coming true. Age of Extinction means several things to her now.
From RED CARPET: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Erich Schwartzel.
Erich Schwartzel has reported on the film industry for The Wall Street Journal since 2013. He is the author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.
