But in China, it was the most successful film in the country’s history, partly because its final act was shot in China (including some segments by the Great Wall and the extended destruction of Hong Kong). Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth in the sci-fi action series, was released to poor reviews in 2014 and was the franchise’s lowest grosser in the United States. Hollywood has been not-so-subtly featuring Asian actors and locations in many of its recent blockbusters to appeal to a wider market. One imagines that in China, the advertising will tell a different story, and the poster won’t be as Damon-dominant. But Damon speaks the only lines, and is the only actor billed, despite the presence of Chinese-language cinema legends like Andy Lau and Zhang Hanyu. The film’s trailer is by all accounts spectacular Zhang is known as one of Chinese cinema’s greatest visual stylists for a reason. Now, less than a year later, the man who lectured the African-American producer Effie Brown over the limits of diversity in Hollywood is the face of a film that embodies all of the industry’s worst tendencies, by yet again putting a white American actor at the center of another culture’s story. The Great Wall is now the most dramatic example of whitewashing: Though it’s rooted in Chinese history and culture, and is made by a Chinese director and studio, the film is already relying solely on the face of a well-known white American actor to sell its story.ĭamon is, by all accounts, a well-meaning guy with left-leaning politics, but he’s already once been embroiled in a debate over Hollywood’s institutional racism after a much-discussed episode of his HBO filmmaking show Project Greenlight. As China becomes a bigger and bigger part of the overall box-office market, it makes sense that Hollywood would produce more films designed to appeal directly to the country’s audiences.īut the poster alone has sparked an outcry that the film’s creators should have seen coming from 5,500 miles away-especially given all the recent attention paid to the industry’s lack of diversity in front of and behind the camera. The Great Wall, with a budget of $135 million, is the most expensive Chinese film ever made. The Great Wall may well represent the next step in Hollywood economics: A film made by one of the country’s greatest directors (Zhang Yimou), shot on location in China and telling a story about the Northern Song Dynasty, while starring one of Hollywood’s biggest names. Red Rocket Is a Terrifyingly Honest Look at a Shameless Man David Sims