40 years ago, 'Star Wars' was banned from Chinese theaters. Now it's breaking box office records
SHANGHAI—When the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977, it never made it to China. Mao Zedong had died less than a year earlier, leaving behind a legacy of blocking western culture, and every film screened in the country was government-produced. The Star Wars mania that gripped the western world might have been taking place in a galaxy far, far away.
Four decades later, the force is strong in China. The Force Awakens, the latest movie in the series, shattered box office records when it opened here Saturday, raking in $53 million during its opening weekend. Globally, it’s now the third-highest-grossing movie in history.
In a country that still strictly regulates foreign movies with a yearly quota, the success of Star Wars illustrates big changes in the film industry here, now the number two film market in the world by box office revenue.
China’s major cities have been blanketed this month with ads for The Force Awakens on city streets, in subways, and on TV. It’s hard to take a ride on the Shanghai Metro without watching the Millennium Falcon soaring by or seeing BB-8 rolling across a screen. Disney even placed 500 Stormtrooper figurines on the Great Wall for one promotional stunt.
The company also made all six previous movies available online on Tencent, a popular Netflix-like streaming service, and released a music video by Chinese pop superstar LuHan in which he dances in Jedi robes and sings about “feeling the Force.”
The big advertising push seems to have made up for the fact that most Chinese moviegoers don’t feel the same nostalgia that many Americans do for Star Wars. While fans grew up with the original films in the U.S., that wasn’t possible in China.For the first few decades of the country’s Communist rule, western cultural influences were banned and the only movies shown were government-produced, propagandistic clunkers. Unsurprisingly, ticket sales were anemic. So in 1994, the film ministry launched a quota system allowing 10 foreign movies a year to be released in the country. The first foreign film to get wide release was The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford (who, of course, plays Han Solo in Star Wars).
Most of the movies approved under the quota system in the years that followed were Hollywood action blockbusters, which tend to translate well and avoid politically-sensitive material that might offend censors. “No one wanted to take a shot on an art film or a small indie film, so big blockbusters and summer popcorn films were what got equated with western films,” said Michael Berry, a University of California Santa Barbara professor who’s writing a book on Chinese cinema.
The three prequel Star Wars movies were all released under the quota in the late ’90s and 2000s, but they didn’t do very well: Revenge of the Sith made just $11.7 million in box office revenue in 2005, with the previous two films falling even further behind.