No indication if China would embrace ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ movie

LOS ANGELES: There has been few indications that China would embrace the summer blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians like America has.

Getting a release date itself was quite an achievement.

Three months ago, Crazy Rich Asians took the film industry by storm, with Asian-American moviegoers and media critics alike hailing it as a long-overdue celebration of talent from an ethnicity that has been severely under-represented in media.

But this week, the film will be released in a market in which it will be much harder to find success: China.

Regardless of how it does there, Jon M. Chu’s romantic comedy is already a success for Warner Bros, with US$236 million (RM991 million) grossed worldwide against a US$30 million budget. But when the Chinese film board announced last month that it had approved Crazy Rich Asians for release today, it surprised some observers.

Stanley Rosen, a political science professor at the USC USChina Institute, told TheWrap he didn’t expect that Crazy would get a China release at all, and that expectations should be kept low for its box office potential there. While a film with an allAsian cast was a huge breath of fresh air in the US, it’s not as special in a country with a growing film industry that’s releasing hundreds of films made by China, for China every year.

And then, of course, there’s the extravagant wealth that’s on display from start to finish.

“The Chinese government won’t explicitly endorse the sort of life they show in this movie, but obviously, looking at the current culture, there is a certain amount of wealth and luxury they will allow,” he said. “So the film might gain some interest in major cities like Shanghai where that sort of elite lifestyle is common.”

But Rosen points out that China is on the verge of supplanting the US as the largest movie-going market in the world because cinemas there are rapidly expanding into more rural parts of the country. In these areas, going to the movies is often the one luxury outing that families can regularly afford.

Many of the Hollywood blockbusters that have become hits in China, including the Marvel and Fast & Furious franchises, have been successful because they’ve found a foothold in those small but numerous markets.

The challenge for Crazy Rich Asians is that instead of offering superheroes or highoctane action, the film focuses on a romance between a couple from two walks of life. The first is the Singaporean elite that Nick Young and his family come from, full of extravagant parties held on remote islands and in enormous mansions.

The other is that of the film’s protagonist, Rachel Chu, the daughter of a Chinese expat. Although the film doesn’t focus on Rachel’s mother and her life in China as much as Kevin Kwan’s novel does, it’s still a topic of discussion. While Rosen notes that the Chinese government didn’t object to this the way he thought it would, he’s still not sure that Chinese moviegoers in those rural areas will be interested in seeing a movie that looks at modern Asian culture through the eyes of a foreigner.

“It may be set in Asia, but a lot of this movie is about the American dream,” he said.