China has moved to “moderately reduce” the release of Hollywood films in the Chinese market in the latest front of the growing United States-China trade war.
China’s National Film Administration directly linked their decision on Thursday to US tariffs on Chinese products, which US President Donald Trump has raised to a sky-high 145 percent.
“The wrong move by the US government to abuse tariffs on China will inevitably further reduce the domestic audience’s favourability towards American films,” the film administration said in its announcement.
“We will follow market rules, respect the audience’s choice, and moderately reduce the number of American films imported,” it said.
The decision likely came as no surprise to observers, who had predicted that China might target Hollywood as part of its response to surging US tariffs.
China accepts 10 films a year from Hollywood, and the Chinese market was once seen as a major source of revenue for the US film industry.
In recent years, though, the popularity of Western movies has waned with Hollywood films accounting for just 5 percent of box office receipts in China, according to Chris Fenton, author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business.
Still, the message sent by China to the US movie industry will be hard to miss, Fenton said, due to the industry’s symbolic cultural power.
“Such a high-profile punishment of Hollywood is an all-win motion of strength by Beijing that will surely be noticed by Washington,” Fenton told the Reuters news agency.
It is still unclear how the decision will impact much-anticipated releases due later this year, such as Paramount’s Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Warner Brothers’ latest Superman movie, and another version of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four.
President Trump, who has been rebuked by many Hollywood celebrities in the past for his policies, told reporters on Thursday he was untroubled by the decision taken in China to target the film industry.
“I think I’ve heard of worse things,” he said in response to a query.
