Maverick’ Breaks Box Office Records And Hollywood’s China Chains – Opinion

Things have been pretty bleak and heartbreaking of late, so here’s some good news.

“Top Gun: Maverick” has been lighting up movie screens and — based on my own personal social media observations — is routinely inspiring clapping and cheering from American audiences. And that’s not even the best part. It is the second installment in the Tom Crusie masterpiece, 1986. This success was achieved without the assistance of Tencent, an internet and tech giant from China.

Did you see the 2018 trailer featuring certain flags that featured a flight jacket to placate Chinese censors. Wow, things have changed.

This week’s theater-goers in Taiwan were delighted to see the film. Maverick: Top Gun features a prominent shot of the Japanese and Taiwanese flags—national symbols that were scrubbed from a 2019 trailer.

The flags were initially replaced by random symbols, drawing sharp criticism as an example of Hollywood caving in to China’s political demands. But in a rare U-turn, which has yet to be explained, they have reappeared in the film’s worldwide release.

“It is unprecedented,” Ho Siu Bun, a film critic in Hong Kong, told VICE World News. “Major film studios have never been shy about pandering to the Chinese market. Editing is expensive, even for a small scene. So no one knows why they changed it back.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, Tencent’s involvment — an agreement the company boasted about during production — “once symbolized deepening ties between China and Hollywood.” The gaming company’s about-face on a movie that’s drawn many domestic movie buffs back to the theater is now seen as “a fresh example of the broader tensions forming between the U.S. and China.”

One of the largest tech companies in the world, Tencent operates the popular WeChat messaging app, a videogame business and a streaming-entertainment platform. It has been one of several Chinese firms moving most aggressively into Hollywood, investing in big-budget releases like “Terminator: Genisys” and smaller titles like the Mr. Rogers biopic “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

People familiar with the finance say that Tencent first invested 12.5% of its money in the film, before it dropped out.

In late 2019, when Tencent quietly backed away from the film, companies operating in China were under pressure to pledge loyalty to the Communist Party as part of President Xi Jinping’s tightening grip on his country’s businesses. At a July 2019 ceremony announcing its co-financing of “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tencent also trumpeted a coming lineup of propagandistic domestic films extolling the history and heroism of the Chinese Communist Party.

What makes this break between the two nations over a Hollywood film particularly interesting is that Tencent is a gaming company, not an entertainment giant, But the company has been pronounced in its desire to dip its fingers in a whole lot of other pies — and has more than its fair share of concerning scandals related to the theft of intellectual property and surreptitious user data collection.

Tencent’s ownership of at least part of most of your favourite developers and games is one of the most shocking things you will learn about the company. Tencent has made investments in approximately 150 businesses outside China. These aren’t insignificant companies, either. Reddit and Spotify are just a few of the most prominent names on this list.

Tencent’s presence in gaming is even greater. It is also a major investor in Activision Blizzard’s Epic Games, Riot Games and Bluehole. These investments give Tencent a piece of some of the world’s biggest games, such as World of Warcraft, Fortnite, League of Legends, and PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds.

…

Both Riot Games and Epic Games received letters from the United States Committee on Foreign Investments that requested details on their security protocols for customers’ personal data. This is part of US government efforts under Trump to understand Chinese use data from software that was sold to Americans.

While these investigations into Tencent’s gaming investments were unsettling, they stopped short of the more dramatic actions the US government took against other Tencent holdings. The Trump administration banned the popular messaging app WeChat, owned by Tencent, in September 2020, alongside Bytedance’s popular social platform TikTok.  According to a letter from the White House, WeChat and TikTok had collected so much data from American citizens that it could allow companies to “conduct corporate espionage.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tencent’s decision to walk away from a film that’s looking like it will break $150 million at the box office Memorial Day weekend isn’t some great mystery. It’s simply run-of-the-mill Communist party politics.

The reason: Tencent executives backed out of the $170 million Paramount Pictures production after they grew concerned that Communist Party officials in Beijing would be angry about the company’s affiliation with a movie celebrating the American military, according to people familiar with the matter.

American audiences have more reasons to cheer for “Top Gun: Maverick” this weekend than they may even realize.