The Hollywood Upside of Trump’s Trade War

By Jack Butler

Sunday, April 13, 2025

 

What makes a good movie villain? Partly, it’s that the Hans Grubers and Khan Noonien Singhs of cinema act like they are the main characters. The actual main character is, to them, just getting in the way — or something they must destroy.

 

Hollywood would have a hard time creating a fictional antagonist that fit this description as well as the Chinese Communist Party does. The CCP takes China’s ancient self-conception as the “Middle Kingdom” literally, such that it wants to force the entire world to revolve around its designs — and destroy or subsume whatever stands in its way. Donald Trump’s trade war, haphazard and slapdash as it is, appears aimed at thwarting this aspiration.

 

Its overall prospects are questionable at best. But it could force an economic decoupling that Americans and our allies should welcome: a separation of America’s film industry from China.

 

Some estrangement is likely to be forced on Hollywood amid the ongoing trade war. As part of its response to Trump’s tariffs, the CCP is considering reducing the number of American films allowed into its market, or banning our films outright. And some of the estrangement has already occurred. In 2024, no American film made the top ten in China’s box office. The same thing happened in 2023. Neither Barbie nor Oppenheimer, both global phenomena, made the top 30 there. The Chinese market now accounts for only 5 percent of Hollywood box office receipts.

 

This is quite the turnaround from even just a few years ago. Movies such as Fast and Furious 9 (or “F9: The Fast Saga,” as it is ludicrously dubbed) and World of Warcraft made more money in China than they did here. As long as a studio could convince China’s selective and government-controlled film industry to let its movie be one of the few allowed into the nation’s theaters, more profits were guaranteed.

 

That Hollywood kept less of those profits than it does in this country or in other countries was just one sign this bargain was Faustian. There were ominous signs from the very beginning of Hollywood’s entanglement with China, as Erich Schwartzel recounts in his excellent Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.

 

Chinese authorities let in such movies as The Fugitive but raised a huge fuss over pro-Tibet cinema like Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet. As Hollywood got even more access to China (thanks in large part to Joe Biden and Chris Dodd), it began tailoring releases to minimize offense to the Chinese market. Mission: Impossible III removed hanging dirty laundry from a chase scene in Shanghai. Iron Man III added several pro-China scenes to its release in that country. Dr. Strange, in that same franchise, changed a character’s background from Tibetan. Sometimes, entire movies were altered: The 2012 Red Dawn remake absurdly refashioned the conquerors of America as North Korean when they were initially Chinese. This behavior extended to marketing as well. Promoting the aforementioned F9, star John Cena (correctly) referred to Taiwan as a country; he was made to apologize.

 

While America was catering to China, China was hardly returning the favor. Its movies became ever more China-boosting, concurrent with the increasing national chauvinism of the CCP under Xi’s leadership. One of its most successful movies of recent years was a (historically dubious) depiction of the Korean War, with Americans as the villains. As Schwartzel writes, its own film industry was “ordered to adjust finished Chinese movies to do anything possible to bolster Chinese nationalism, even as Hollywood movies continued to cut anything that might anger Chinese censors.” So much for the notion that the CCP has no aspirations to cultural hegemony.

 

All the while, China was building up its own film industry. It engaged in the same technology transfer other industries have experienced. It studied the American film industry, copied it (with money generated from American film releases), and built up domestic audience demand. Now, China barely needs Hollywood. But Hollywood still thinks it needs China.

 

It doesn’t. The U.S. and China may still, at this time, be economically entangled. But culturally, they are moving apart. China’s biggest blockbusters can make as much money as our own — but they have virtually no footprint here and tend not to have much of one in other countries. Yet the best American films, such as Top Gun: Maverick, thrive not just with domestic audiences but also with our cultural (and geopolitical) allies. Further separation would benefit American supremacy.

 

It could even make our movies better. It is no accident, as the last communists to corrupt Hollywood might have said, that the American film industry has become more reliant on easily made CGI spectacle and other easily translatable but lower-brow qualities as its dependence on the Chinese market increased.

 

One of the other characteristics that makes a good movie villain is that he seems to have a point, or a sympathetic enough perspective or sufficient charisma to get audience buy-in. So now, Xi Jinping is calling Trump a “bully” for his tariffs and threats, and disingenuously taking up the mantle of global free trade — even as the CCP imposes its own economic punishments, following its decades of economic depredations.

 

But it would be good for America and our film industry if the latter’s long fling with China ended, even as a result of a trade war. Trump’s response to the CCP threat to Hollywood is appropriately insouciant, in this instance: “I think I’ve heard of worse things.”