Things to Come

Would it surprise you to learn that the third-biggest film in the world so far this year grossed over A$1.5 million in Australia,^[1]‘International’, ‘Liu Lang Di Qiu (2019)’, The Numbers, <https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Liu-Lang-Di-Qiu-(China)-(2019)#tab=international>, accessed 28 May 2019. and yet it has hardly been reviewed in the English-language press here? Meet the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon that is The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019). And there is some urgency to familiarising ourselves with this film, because it looks like the face of the future. Released over the Chinese New Year period, it has grossed over US$690 million in China, making it the second-largest grosser of all time in that country.^[2]‘Biggest Film in a Single Market’, The Numbers, <https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/single-market>, accessed 28 May 2019. At the time of writing, the film had a worldwide gross approaching US$700 million, making it third on 2019’s international box-office charts, behind Avengers: Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo) and Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck).^[3]‘Top 2019 Movies at the Worldwide Box Office’, The Numbers, <https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/released-in-2019>, accessed 28 May 2019.

In world cinema, as in world anything right now, China is the big news. Its cinema-exhibition revenue continues to grow at a furious rate (9 per cent last year), with a box office totalling US$8.9 billion in 2018 – on pace to overtake the North American figure of US$11.9 billion within the next three years.^[4]Patrick Brzeski, ‘China Box Office Growth Slows to 9 Percent in 2018, Ticket Sales Reach $8.9B’, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 January 2018, <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/china-box-office-total-revenue-2018-1172725>, accessed 28 May 2019. The advent in this country of an effects-driven genre such as sci-fi shows that some Chinese filmmakers are intent on integrating the most successful elements of the Hollywood blockbuster. Several questions arise: How is the sci-fi blockbuster inflected for the Chinese market? What are the prospects of it creating films with genuine international appeal? And, crucially, what might all this mean for Australia, now and in the future?

The Wandering Earth has been widely hailed as the first in a wave of science fiction blockbusters in Chinese cinema; Crazy Alien (Ning Hao, 2019) was released at the same time, while Shanghai Fortress (Teng Huatao) and Pathfinder (Zhang Xiaobei) are set to follow later this year.^[5]See, for example, Rebecca Davis, ‘The Wandering Earth Is Leading the Sci-fi Charge at China’s Box Office’, Variety, 14 March 2019, <https://variety.com/2019/film/asia/wandering-earth-sci-fi-china-box-office-1203161818/>; and Patrick Brzeski, ‘Chinese Film Sector Charts a Course for a Sci-fi Blockbuster to Call Its Own’, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 December 2017, <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/chinese-film-sector-charts-a-course-a-sci-fi-blockbuster-call-own-1062774>, both accessed 28 May 2019. The sci-fi genre – heavily larded with CGI effects – is, of course, a crucial part of the currency of global screen culture. Attempts to sell The Wandering Earth internationally have largely focused on Liu Cixin, the award-winning Chinese writer of the sci-fi novella on which the film is based. Netflix, eager to bolster its local content offerings as it strives to consolidate its international position, rose to the bait and quickly made the film a high-profile acquisition.^[6]Andrew Liptak, ‘China’s Blockbuster The Wandering Earth Is Coming to Netflix’, The Verge, 21 February 2019, <https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18234819/netflix-the-wandering-earth-china-science-fiction-blockbuster-cixin-liu-film>, accessed 28 May 2019.

The film races through its exposition with all the ruthlessness of the newsreel in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Within the first three minutes, we are told that, firstly, sometime in the future, our sun is showing signs of becoming a red giant, threatening to engulf the earth; and, secondly, the world government has come up with an audacious plan to move all the people to underground cities and fit the planet with giant rocket engines, which will propel it out of our solar system and into that of Alpha Centauri. This is a journey that will take many generations. Anyone wanting to read the film as an allegory would have little difficulty seeing it as a response to China entering a transitional period of mammoth change.

As with most Hollywood epics, it is assumed that large-scale events are best understood through small-scale family melodramas. Qi (Qu Chuxiao) and his sister, Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai), live underground while their father, Peiqiang (Wu Jing), is away. He has been absent for many years, working, not in a factory in Shenzhen, but on a space station that guards and guides the planet from afar. However, as Earth cruises past Jupiter, things go wrong (just as they go wrong with China cruising past the US economy, perhaps?), and the Earth is drawn calamitously towards the larger planet. Heroes must step up, and our teenage Chinese rebels fit the bill.

If one looks for a thematic dynamic in Gwo’s film that is relevant to contemporary China, it is the attempt to reconcile the family and globalism. The Wandering Earth has been routinely compared to Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998),^[7]See, for example, Simon Abrams, ‘The Wandering Earth’, RogerEbert.com, 15 February 2019, <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-wandering-earth-2019>, accessed 28 May 2019. in which, you will recall, astronaut Harry (Bruce Willis) blows himself up, thereby saving the Earth while simultaneously resolving a tricky Electra-complex-like crisis with his daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler). In Gwo’s narrative, it is the duty of adults to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the younger generation; indeed, commercial Chinese films routinely foreground youth, on the understanding that this mirrors the demographic slapping down its (or rather its parents’) 100-yuan notes at the new megaplexes. But the move to sci-fi signals a search for a more globally palatable product than successful action films such as Wolf Warrior 2 (Wu Jing, 2017) or Operation Red Sea (Dante Lam Chiu Yin, 2018), which have drawn criticism in the Western press for daring to suggest that Chinese nationalism is on the rise and might be expressed through militarism.^[8]See, for example, Stephen K Hirst, ‘Wolf Warrior 2, China’s Answer to Rambo, Is a Map of the Nation’s Future’, Salon, 18 August 2017, <https://www.salon.com/2017/08/18/wolf-warrior-2/>; and Maggie Lee, ‘Film Review: Operation Red Sea’, Variety, 2 March 2018, <https://variety.com/2018/film/asia/operation-red-sea-review-1202710157/>, accessed 28 May 2019. Science fiction of the sort we see in Gwo’s film, in casting its dangers on a planetary scale, at least has a more utopian tendency to posit world cooperation as its starting point. Certainly, this is the case here, as the disembodied – though French-speaking – world government organises ineffectual global action, but has to cede primacy of place to the Chinese, who are a nation of go-getters possessing the youthful exuberance and self-belief to save the world.

At the session I attended, I was the only non-Chinese member of the audience, and a young woman approached me to tell me how much she loved The Wandering Earth and that this was her second visit. After seeing the film myself, I was puzzled by this reaction. I was appalled by the lack of clarity in the action sequences, the unsympathetic nature of the central characters (especially Duoduo, who dissolves into tears at vexatious moments) and the way that the heroic group don’t achieve anything much until the very end of the film. My reaction was in keeping with those of Asian cinephile friends, who, while interested in the growth of a Chinese film industry that might challenge Hollywood hegemony, regularly assure me that its output is still pretty terrible.

I suspect that, for a Chinese audience, these films have a quality of nationalistic novelty. The local people have never seen anything like this from their own filmmakers, and, before being seen in aesthetic terms, such works represent for them a claim to be a vital part of world culture. A national cinema is many things, including the assertion that one is on equal footing with other nations. This is a reaction that ought to be familiar to any Australian who lived through the early 1970s, when each new Aussie film was an explicit statement on what Australianness, and an Australian cinema, could aspire to be.

But what can Chinese cinema aspire to be? Answers to this question involve not only aesthetic issues concerning the films, but also, more vitally, industrial questions about how these films will circulate. What is a film, after all, but a bundle of rights that can be licensed for distribution fees on different platforms and in different parts of the world?

I noted earlier that The Wandering Earth has grossed US$700 million globally to date, with US$690 million of that coming from China. In other words, outside of its homeland, the film has largely been restricted to diasporic Chinese audiences and eked out relatively minor amounts of money. Contrast this with the Chinese–American co-production The Meg (Jon Turteltaub, 2018). Now, no-one is going to claim this was a great film, but it grossed US$153 million in China and over US$377 million throughout the rest of the world.^[9]‘The Meg’, Box Office Mojo, <https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=wbeventfilm2018.htm>, accessed 28 May 2019. The lesson to draw from this is that a Western star (Jason Statham) and distributor (Warner Bros.) with a global pipeline are still crucial to broad international success.

However, this isn’t just a global story. It can be given a particularly Australian inflection. The future begins now, and China is inevitably going to be a big part of it. Australia’s economic patterns have changed as we become more intertwined with China’s economic growth, and our major cities are evolving as they become host to large East Asian populations. But how our cinema will change is still a matter open to speculation. Gwo’s film does offer an interesting case in point, though. Of the approximately US$10 million that The Wandering Earth has grossed internationally, Australia has provided the second largest amount. It opened day-and-date with China and debuted at eighth place on the Australian box-office list despite being released on only twenty-three screens. Its average gross per screen was three-and-a-half times greater than Escape Room (Adam Robitel, 2019), the Hollywood film that opened at number one that week on over 200 screens.^[10]‘Weekend Australia Chart for February 8, 2019 (USD)’, The Numbers, <https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-chart/weekend/2019/02/08/Australia>, accessed 28 May 2019.

The Wandering Earth is distributed in Australia by CMC (China Media Capital), a Beijing-based company that distributes Chinese films in over fifty countries.^[11]See ‘CMC Pictures’, The Film Catalogue, <https://www.thefilmcatalogue.com/companies/cmc-pictures>, accessed 28 May 2019. Thus far in 2019, it has released three films in Australia, following the six titles from last year.^[12]Sourced by the author from The Numbers and Box Office Mojo. Along with the appearance in Australia of another international distributor, the TangRen Cultural Film Group – responsible for releasing fourteen Chinese titles here in 2018^[13]See the list of 2018 titles on the TangRen Cultural Film Group website, <http://www.tangren.com.au/movies?years=2018>, accessed 28 May 2019. – this raises the possibility that China might begin to develop its own global distribution pipelines (though I suspect I am getting ahead of myself here, as CMC’s English-language website^[14]See <https://www.cmc-pictures.com>, accessed 28 May 2019. has not even been updated this year). While Chinese companies have been buying into production and exhibition companies – as Dalian Wanda has with Hoyts in Australia^[15]Fergus Ryan, ‘Hoyts Sold to China Cinema Giant Wanda’, The Australian, 3 June 2015, <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/hoyts-sold-to-china-cinema-giant-wanda/news-story/31b6c626ab4987242c23388af6b1d91d>, accessed 28 May 2019. – their industry’s ability to sustain its own international distribution is a vital step.

These fledgling foreign distribution companies join locally based ones such as China Lion, Magnum and CineAsia that have operated for some time by buying Australasian rights to Chinese films. What we haven’t seen yet is the desire on the part of any of these distributors to expand beyond marketing to diasporic audiences. More active, more local representation, the preparation of English-language press kits and trailers, and the purchase of advertising in the mainstream media are all steps we might expect to see as Chinese cinema takes a more prominent place on the world stage. The development of an international star system might be the start of this. Wu Jing is the biggest name in Chinese cinema right now, but he still lags behind ageing stars such as Jackie Chan in international recognition. The future is on its way, and these are steps that might ultimately pull the wandering Earth of Chinese cinema away from the Jupiter-like gravitational pull of Hollywood.