In response to US tariffs on Chinese products, Beijing announced on Thursday, April 10, the immediate restriction on imports of Hollywood films. "We will moderately reduce the number of imported American films," the Chinese National Film Administration stated. Is this a significant snub to Hollywood studios? Not necessarily, even though this week the comedy Minecraft, by Jared Hess, co-produced by Legendary (an American production company acquired by the Chinese group Wanda in 2016) and distributed by Warner Bros, topped the box office in China, with over $20 million (17.6 million euros) in revenue since its release on April 4.

For years, Beijing has built a genuine regulatory wall to stem any invasion of foreign films by imposing an annual quota of 34 imported foreign films. This threshold is often exceeded considering, for example, that Jean-Jacques Annaud's film Wolf Totem (2015) was oddly deemed a Chinese film... Additionally, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which includes all Hollywood studios and Netflix, notes that since 2017, studios have received less than 25% of box office revenue in Chinese cinemas while they earn double in all other countries.

You have 70.78% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.