Newly-released Tom Cruise starrer ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ has the potential to anger China and show that Hollywood is slowly changing its stance towards Chinese censorship.
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While Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen called for wider international recognition of Taiwan as a de facto independent nation, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell understood the assignment.
When the trailer of the cinema was released in 2019 the flag could not be seen properly which led some people to wonder if Hollywood producers removed the flag to satisfy demands from China’s censors. When the full movie was released in theaters observers were able to spot the Taiwanese flag, news agency Bloomberg reported citing Taiwanese news outlet SETN.
Fearing Xi, China will not release the cinema.
This is also a pivot from the past. Hollywood producers and film studios have a tradition of bowing to the whims and fancies of the CCP censors. Even without them acquiescing to the demands of Beijing, China often censors cinema to even give them alternate endings as seen in the case of Fight Club (1999) directed by David Fincher. The Taiwan flag on the jacket signals that some Hollywood executives are tired of acquiescing to the so-called demands of Chinese society.
Maverick topped the Memorial Day weekend charts in North America, taking in an estimated $124 million in ticket sales.
Chris Fenton, author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business while speaking to Bloomberg News said that Hollywood is pushing back and the ‘market is simply not worth the aggravation anymore in attempting to please Chinese censors’.
Xi also struck fear in the hearts of the owners of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd who withdrew from the $170 million Paramount Pictures production citing fears that their affiliation to a cinema that celebrates the US military may anger the CCP, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Not only Hollywood, China also did not spare airline companies with regard to Taiwan. In 2018 Air France-KLM and Deutsche Lufthansa AG were among 40 airlines which modified their websites for references to Taiwan included in them.
(with inputs from Bloomberg)
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