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Comment by moose_man | Hacker News Reader

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What does that have to do with the article?

Literally everything. I'll save the explainer, since there's plenty of comments already doing that here.

I don’t see why, if they’re so desperate for Chinese money, the studio couldn’t just make two cuts of the movie with different maps, one for China and one for the rest of the world. Are China really going to ban the Chinese version just because the other one exists? And vice versa with Vietnam? Being that scared/desperate to not upset China is super weak.

> Are China really going to ban the Chinese version just because the other one exists?

They sometimes edit themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_China#List_...

My favorite are the ones where they make sure there's a "happy ending" where the authorities win, often with a title card like the Simpsons's "Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet" joke.

> In 2022, Fight Club was released in China with an altered ending: a text screen explaining that the authorities triumphed after figuring out Project Mayhem's plan, and that Tyler Durden was committed to a psychiactric institution. This prompted backlash and the film's original ending was subsequently restored.

> The Chinese release of Lord of War cuts the final 30 minutes from the film and replaces it with a text screen summary stating that Yuri Orlov confessed to all crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.

Why permit two versions when you can flex your muscles and force everyone to see the version you want, though?

But also, interestingly:

> The Narrator finds redemption at the end of the film by rejecting Tyler Durden's dialectic, a path that diverged from the novel's ending in which the Narrator is placed in a mental institution.

> An online release in China from Tencent censored the bomb blasts at the end and replaced the ending with a message that Project Mayhem was thwarted, with Tyler Durden being arrested by law enforcement and placed in an insane asylum until 2012, adapting the ending of the original Fight Club novel. [...] The novel's author Chuck Palahniuk believed the censored version partially restored the books ending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club

… or, leave the map out of the movie… if the barbie movie turns out to pivot on geopolitics I'll eat a one inch hot pink pair of pumps…

Yes, China will absolutely ban them because the other version exists. The point for China isn't just to manipulate their citizens, but control what the world sees as well... they have a billion+ person market and they know how to wield it to get what they want from corporations desperate to show good quarterly profits.

> Are China really going to ban the Chinese version just because the other one exists

Yes, without a second thought.

China isn't trying to convince people inside China that the South China Sea is their sovereign territory. They're trying to push the belief on the rest of the world.

They push whatever narrative makes them the most money. At least when someone has a bad set of principals they have principals. Hollywood would simultaneously release an Anne Frank drama in one country and a holocaust denial "documentary" in another if it was profitable.

The old Lenin line, capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with. I would argue that this mainly applies to Western capitalism.

Communism will force you to take the rope to hang yourself with, and also force you to say you’re not hanging your self while you’re tying the noose around your neck.

Why? Hollywood has been making tons of cultural concessions to placate the American market.

Of course there are films that celebrate a made up, white washed version of America's history, like say, Mel Gibson's The Patriot, but America was never censored and not released movies critical of its own history.

It's not about placating the American market for financial success, it's that the government won't allow the movie to be released unless they add these elements in it, and Hollywood bows to this.

For your what-aboutism to work, you're going to need to find a movie that the US government interfered with, to fit its agenda, otherwise it would prevent the release of, and Hollywood going along with it.

>. Of course there are films that celebrate a made up, white washed version of America's history, like say, Mel Gibson's The Patriot, but America was never censored and not released movies critical of its own history

Not quite: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hir...

The US military had them delete the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the 2014 release of Godzilla - something pretty essential to the "lore".

I'm missing the not quite part here? The studios wanted to utilize fighter jets and other military grade hardware for their movie, I assume to make it more realistic, and in return they help market the US military as more kind, professional, whatever organization.

There's nothing stopping the filmmaker from creating those items as props, using CGI, ... and releasing their movie, completely ignoring the demands of the Defense Department.

China, unlike the US, has a quota on the number of foreign films it allows to be imported into the country, and to be selected for one of these coveted spots, Hollywood and film makers change the content of the their movies to fit the narrative of the Chinese government. Try marking Taiwan as an independent country and see where that gets you, for example. Alternatively, try releasing a movie sympathetic to the Taliban, or being critical of America in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. No one will stop you. The two countries are not equally problematic here.

That's because they asked for jet fighters and US military hardware to be in their movie. They were asking the government to participate significantly in the production.

There's a nice wiki page on this exact topic. In in the US it's just become another branch of the military industrial complex, Wiki calls it the military-entertainment complex. [1] It works using the carrot instead of the stick, but the outcome is largely the same. The military offers funding and access studios that create movies furthering US interests, enlistment, etc. Studios that work against these interests not only lose these opportunities, but risk imperiling access to them in the future.

"By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, Hollywood producers were stressing script writers to create military-related plots to gain production power from the U.S. military."

The Guardian also has a really great article on this [2] from back before they joined said complex. It comes down to the exact same thing with China. They want those Yuan, and randomly shoehorning controversial geopolitical maps into a Barbie movie is going to help you on that path.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jul/06/us-military-hol...

When, at least since the 1950s "red scare," has the US government censored a movie from the entire country's market over something political? Even then, I don't think such a thing occurred.

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