Source: New York Times
The assault was swift and sustained: 500 Stormtroopers stood on the Great Wall. X-Wings swooped into Shanghai and Beijing. Lightsabers crackled in theaters across the country.
And millions of moviegoers responded: This again? Who cares?
One after another, “Star Wars” movies have flopped in China, defying efforts to bring one of the most successful franchises in history into a market that has printed money for the heroes, monsters and robots of other films. The latest “Star Wars” movie, “The Rise of Skywalker,” has followed the trend by grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide and barely breaking $20 million in China.
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The campaign underscores how much money is at stake in the Chinese film market, now the second largest in the world. The latest “Avengers” movie grossed more than half a billion dollars there, and series like “Transformers” and “The Fast and the Furious” consistently make hundreds of millions of dollars.
The difference, film historians and industry experts said, is that movies like “Hobbs & Shaw” or “Jurassic World” can mostly stand apart from the stories they followed, and that Chinese audiences have grown up with series like Marvel’s comic-book heroes.
But almost no one in China grew up with the original “Star Wars.” When the first films were released in the late 1970s and early ’80s, China was coming out of the Cultural Revolution, an era in which Western entertainment was suppressed and people with ties to the West were persecuted.
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