for students from Peking University and the China Film Academy were also held this week with Nolan in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. The filmmaker then traveled to Shanghai for additional screenings as Nolan conducted Q&As with students from FuDan University and the Shanghai Theater Academy.
While China’s borders have been open for about six months, we’ve not seen a pre-pandemic level influx of talent. At the same time, although authorities have been freer in general with release dates for Hollywood movies, audiences have also been very high on local titles and tepid on U.S. films.USC professor and China expert Stanley Rosen muses that “Hollywood studios see the Chinese market as a nice bonus, but no longer essential for success.
Rosen thinks geopolitics is playing a part, suggesting that recently there has been a combination of factors keeping folks from traveling to China, “starting with the state of U.S.-China relations and the widespread criticism of Hollywood in and out of Congress that Hollywood is pandering to China and helping it launder its image around the world.”
Hollywood, Rosen says, “is always concerned about PR, and promoting itself in China may seem like bad PR in the current environment.” However, he believes that issue could be overcome if Hollywood films were still doing well in China.” But with the shift in the market during and after the pandemic, “no recent blockbuster, assuming it even got into China, has matched its predecessor… Getting to China and navigating around China is much more complicated than it used to be.