With The Great Wall, a classic army vs. monsters tale, director Zhang Yimou has brought America the most expensive Chinese film ever created. The movie may be backed by a Hollywood studio and it may star no less an American icon than Matt Damon, and yet it proffers China as the source of military might and moral right. Hollywood and China’s commissars have always made for
Guan Hu’s historical epic about a regiment that made a last stand during the Second Sino-Japanese War had its 2019 release delayed thanks to a mix of the pandemic and objections from state censors, but upon its release last August cracked the country’s top 10 highest grossing films of all-time.
China will also take second on the annual charts with the patriotic anthology film “My People, My Homeland” ($430 million), with both films topping the global grosses for Hollywood films like Sony’s “Bad Boys for Life” ($425.5 million), Warner Bros.’ “Tenet,” ($360 million) and Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” ($321 million). Also in the global top 10 are two more Chinese hits: the animated film “Zhang Jiya” with $240 million and the war film “Sacrifice” with $170 million.