Chinese state media, which obsessively covers box-office news when it sees a political angle for the Communist Party, has been silent about the astonishing success of Top Gun: Maverick – the Tom Cruise film that had financial backing from China’s huge Tencent Holdings until the producers stopped trying to please Beijing’s censors.
Maverick set a few box office records this week, including the biggest Memorial Day opening weekend on record. The film is doing brisk business overseas as well, including a very enthusiastic reception at an advance screening in Taiwan – inspired partly by the continued presence of the Taiwanese flag on the main character’s jacket despite Chinese demands to remove it.
The Battle of Maverick’s Jacket became a significant embarrassment for Top Gun’s producers in 2019, when freeze-frames of images from an early trailer revealed the flags of Taiwan and Japan had been removed. The alteration seemed impossible to explain in character, but was more easily understood when the involvement of a deep-pocketed Chinese tech firm in bankrolling the sequel was revealed.
Tencent, a major investor in Hollywood over the past few years, was originally signed up to co-finance the $170 million production but reportedly backed out because it feared Chinese Communist censors would not allow a movie that portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light to screen in China.
As of Thursday, Maverick does not have a release date in China and industry analysts doubt it will ever get one.
The two biggest films to precede it, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, also have not been released in China – perhaps signaling a permanent breakup between Beijing and Hollywood.
Chinese state media seemed to be preparing audiences for this eventuality in the later days of the coronavirus pandemic, by lecturing American studios on their “distorted values” and boasting that China can now produce its own blockbusters – thanks to more of the Communist Party’s trademark theft of intellectual property, in the view of some disgruntled Western filmmakers who found themselves suddenly kicked to the curb by their Chinese partners.
China would appear to be leaving a lot of money on the table, as Maverick was projected to make at least $80 million at the Chinese box office – and it has more than doubled projections for its American debut. Meanwhile, China’s blockbusters have not been racking up Marvel superhero numbers in foreign markets, especially hyper-nationalist propaganda like The Battle at Lake Changjin, the reigning champion of the Chinese box office.
China combined its boasts of growing cultural clout with its narrative of superior performance against the Wuhan coronavirus to push The Battle at Lake Changjin as proof Hollywood could no longer compete with top-tier Chinese productions, especially at a time when U.S. theaters were having trouble bringing audiences back after the pandemic. The astounding success of Spider-Man: No Way Home demonstrated American audiences were willing to give the silver screen another chance, and they are happily packing theaters for Maverick as well.