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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

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".

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.

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.

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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