A&E
Response to: Hollywood’s Alarming Lack of Creativity
By Alex Witonsky ’17
September 15, 2016
Tags a+e
In a tirelessly nostalgic and nostalgically tiring article on “Hollywood’s Alarming Lack of Creativity,” goon and my fellow Chinese Major Matt Burner ’17 writes on the important issues of cinema and national pride. While this specific instance of intersectionality occurs perhaps in the corn-sane gloom of Amerikkka’s heartland imagination, where collisions end in fender-benders and not fatalities, it’s still a morbid prognosis for empire and its creative capacity. Through Burner’s piece, we may learn that Jaws has had a tooth extraction, that once-prince Spielberg’s crowned head has gone the way of Kanye and Condo and that the American populace is simply “no longer interested in spending the money.” Best to leave summer block-busting to the diligent professionals at work beneath Second Avenue.
So is the dream over? Shall us white-folk join hands and share in a final scream before curtain-fall?
No, not really. Not at all.
To say nothing of Matt’s perception of Hollywood’s creative demise, his claim that Americans aren’t willing to s(h)ell out is wrong. Despite the rising cost of tickets, the American box-office posted a record-breaking revenue of $11 billion in 2015, largely a result of the commercial success of Disney and Lucas Arts’ new iteration of space-lasers and Universal’s Jurassic World.
But it wasn’t only America’s box-office that set records. Up from $36.7 billion in 2014, global box-office revenue in 2015 set an all-time record of approximately $38 billion, according to a 2015 report from The Hollywood Reporter. And, to the chagrin of unpersuaded fatalists, Statista reports that global box office revenue is expected to rise from 38.3 billion in 2016 to 49.3 billion in 2020, an increase of approximately 22 percent.
The growth of foreign film-markets explains Hollywood’s act of creative barratry, its sea-change from pandering to a nation to pandering to nations. Fast and Furious 7, Warcraft, Zootopia: they’re designed with foreign currencies in mind and damn the home continent…I mean really chief, we saw Pixar’s Inside Out together last year in Shanghai, albeit embarrassingly in one of those shared love seats, the result of a translational error, no doubt, and also a consequence of the choice’s unlucky presentation–how could you not come to this obvious conclusion before me?
Happenstance and bad memories aside, China’s short-term mastery of a market economy is chronologically connected to the belated explosion of his silver-screens and consequently, Hollywood’s spiral-eyes.
During the halcyon summer of 2012, when Avengers Assemble, The Amazing Spiderman and The Dark Knight were unleashed upon the public, China was surpassing Japan as the world’s second-largest movie market, claiming US $2.69 billion in box-office earnings by year’s end. Yet, of those sales, foreign imports–primarily from Hollywood–claimed over 50 percent of China’s gross ticket revenue, according to Journey to the West: Chinese Movies in the Global Market. In moviespeak, this is just the beginning for Hollywood’s relationship to China. In 2015, MSN Money reported that the PRC box office grew a dizzying 41 percent to $6.78 billion. According to an industry-analyst at Comscore, China’s box-office may churn out more than double the amount of American box-office revenue by 2030 and surpass the American market by the end of 2018 (two years!).
Part of the reason for this skyrocketing growth can be attributed to the expansion of China’s middle-class. In a 2013 paper on Chinese white-collar moviegoers’ interpretation of product placement in Chinese commercial films, it was reported that this group “watch[es] movies more frequently than other social groups” and that “[it] has significant consumption power, which makes it an attractive market segment coveted by marketers and advertisers,” according to Journal of Promotion Management.
So, if Matt’s perception is correct, that this summer’s flicks were not just an unlucky yield, but an index of something wrong (the Chinese middle-class’ tug on the American market), then he’d sound a lot like David Hancock, Head of Film and Cinema at IHS Screen Digest: “They’re making films that have fairly universal ideas and themes, they’re not really culturally specific.”
Which leads us to an issue greater than the international re-marketing/re-branding/watering down, whatever of Hollywood’s products, (Angela) baby: that of the exportation of culture, of Americanization and cultural imperialism. In a country whose foreign adventures have demonised Others, weaponised police forces and generated naught but the race-based executions of bodies, there is something deeply disingenuous about Hollywood’s plastic becoming America’s makeup. No matter the fact that Darren Seals is found burning in a car, Russia and China can watch Liam Neeson and Rihanna star together in Battleship. Cast Jiang Wen for Star Wars and we’ll finally have constructed a not-quite equal space where all races may coexist in the friendly antagonisms of crossed lightsabers.
Well…
While doing the limbo under the Shanghai TSA, our bags bloated with high-powered blotter acid, it occurred to me that sometime in a not-far-off later, when the afternoon’s anxious cacozelia had been distracted with Qingdao or nipple-looking dumplings or another shopping mall, that the cacodaemoniacal tilt of the stuff would at last kick. In the shade of the Shanghai Tower, or in the sun across the River Bund, where a widened eye looks back across the water to trace the pixelated shaking of a snake’s tail across Citigroup tower, allowing gonzo excess to give way to hot truth: a little sickle, a smaller hammer, both flashing.