The Fate of the Furious set a record with roughly $68 million in a single day in China — but doing so isn’t as simple as overdubbing a domestic blockbuster. Here, a Hollywood executive with expertise in the Chinese market outlines what works — and what doesn’t — in scripts that appeal overseas.
1. Don’t Pander
“Hollywood people who don’t know this market have a stock strategy: Set a location in Asia and write a role for a Chinese star. But look at The Great Wall: They chased the Chinese audience and wound up with a film that didn’t appeal to either American or Chinese audiences.â€
2. Do Go Big
“What works in China is what works internationally, writ large: big, blockbuster, visually driven entertainment. The Fast & Furious movies are enormously successful there. They don’t want a talky comedy. They want to see Vin Diesel driving off the Burj Khalifa.â€
3. Don’t Try to Mix Styles
“The foundations of Chinese storytelling are totally different than Western ones. There’s an element of what we might see as broadness — so if you try to impose Hollywood structures, it would be a disaster.â€
4. Do Pick the Right Villain …
“You’re not going to get a film released over there that has Chinese bad guys. Don’t even try. MGM shot some of [2012’s] Red Dawn with Chinese bad guys and then went back and changed them to North Koreans.â€
5. … And Love Interest
“The Chinese censorship stuff is unspoken but understood. For example, a film where a Western guy ends up with a Chinese girl is very unlikely to get released in China. A Chinese guy ending up with a white girl? That’s totally okay.â€
6. Don’t Include Ghosts
“China has all sorts of prohibitions related to superstitions. To Westerners, the gradations might seem ridiculous, but they’re real. They’re really superstitious about ghosts, so you can’t make a ghost movie. A monster is fine, though.â€
*This article appears in the October 2, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.