The story of China and Hollywood's big-screen romance

That's Ying Zhu, a professor at Columbia University and author of the book Hollywood in China. Although movies were being made in Shanghai, Ying says audiences were most drawn to the American imports, which tended to be flashier and more sophisticated. But this early romance with Hollywood came to an abrupt end in 1950. That's the year after Mao Zedong's Communist Party came into power in China.

The government took over the movie industry and for decades the only films being made were ones that served the Communist Party's interests.

Not exactly popcorn entertainment. Eventually, though, the Mao era came to an end. And in the 1980s, China was opening up to the world. Its movie industry though, had basically withered under government control.

Act two reunited in the early 1990s, China was going through major economic reforms. It was expanding trade with the US and other countries. And one part of that trade relationship was movies. Eric Schwartzel covers the film industry for the Wall Street Journal and wrote about this period in his book Red Carpet.

The Fugitive was a hit, though at first, Eric says these Hollywood flicks trickling into China didn't make much money. That would soon change though, as millions of people moved from rural areas of China into the cities and the country's growing middle Class developed an appetite for big screen entertainment. And by the 2000s, Hollywood saw their revenue from China soar.

Yeah, one big consideration. Films had to make it past government censors.

And in some cases, studios bent over backwards to appeal to Chinese moviegoers. Eric says one of the best examples is Age of Extinction, which was released in 2014.

And.

Now, did studios get criticized for bowing to government censorship and pandering to Chinese audiences? Sure, but what did they care? They were raking in the rmbs, baby. Hollywood blockbusters put butts in the seats of Chinese multiplexes. And it helped resuscitate China's movie industry. And it also made bank for American studios.

Act three, the decoupling. An early sign the romance between Hollywood and China might not be Forever came in 2008. That year, DreamWorks released an animated film called Kung Fu Panda, whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend.

And so they put into legislation that the government would increase support for China's homegrown animation industry. This was just one of many government policies that helped Propel China's movie industry into a new phase. And why not? The geopolitical respect, the soft power potential of a global hit was obvious. So the government offered tax breaks to film production companies. It encouraged co productions between American and Chinese studios. Chinese officials even made trips to Los Angeles to learn the economics of the movie business from American studio execs. During these years, China's film industry blossomed. And one person with a front row seat to it all was Dayan Ng.

Dayon was born in Taiwan but grew up in the US and around 1995 he moved to China to study at the Beijing Film Academy. When he graduated, he thought about returning to the US but then I got

Dayon stayed in China, building up his film credits. And by the 2000s, he made the move into feature films, directing dramas and comedies. Over the years, he says he's seen Chinese audiences tastes evolve and says eventually they got kind of bored with the same old American superhero flicks.

As a result, Hollywood's revenue from Chinese box offices began a years long slide. And it's got to the point where US studios considering whether to greenlight a new movie will basically assume that they'll make zero money there. Meanwhile, China has made its own blockbusters. A recent prime example is Ne Zha 2, this animated movie based on a Chinese folk tale that hit theaters in January. So far, it's brought in over $2 billion, making it the highest grossing animated film ever. And that's even before you account for the fact that an English language version is going to be released in the US later this year. Yet more evidence that Hollywood and China have not exactly divorced, but certainly have decoupled. And China just doesn't need US films as much as it used to. And all this, of course, is not helped by the geopolitics of it all. After President Trump launched a trade war with China this year, one of the ways China retaliated was by further restricting the import of US films. For Dayan, it's all a bit of a bummer because he says a lot of this stuff just does not matter to filmmakers or audiences.

Or to put it another way, the multi part saga that is Hollywood and China may have had its twists and turns, but it's not over yet. Tomorrow in our movie series Cosplay, we explore the symbiotic relationship between movie studios and their costumed superfans. This episode of the Indicator was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Debbie Daughtry and Robert Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Caitlin Cannon is our editor and the Indicators of Production of NPR.