Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Movie theaters shut down again
China started to reopen movie theaters but quickly backtracked amidst fears of a second coronavirus outbreak. How can the film industry survive amidst a worldwide ban on their primary source of revenue?
April 2, 2020
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As the number of new coronavirus cases declined in China, movie theaters started to reopen across the country. Many expect China’s box office ($9.2 billion in 2019) to top North America’s ($11.4 billion) in the next year or two, so the news brought hope to a film industry struggling from worldwide theater closures. But how do you make people feel safe in crowds again? With superheroes, of course. All four of the Marvel Avengers films were set to be rereleased with some of China's other highest grossing box office films.
The films barely made it past the opening credits before Beijing's Film Bureau suddenly ordered the over 600 theaters that had reopened to shut down again. With Iron Man still quarantined, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is coming to the rescue by streaming dozens of films for free, including The Last Emperor, Farewell My Concubine, and The Great Wall. This comes on the heels of a deal where ByteDance, which owns Douyin and TikTok, paid USD$91 million to stream Lost in Russia during the first wave of cinema closures in January.
Movie theaters in the U.S. are still closed too, but Hollywood studios have started putting their new releases on digital platforms earlier than usual. Frozen II, the 10th highest grossing film of all time, was on Disney+ three months ahead of schedule, missing out on digital and disc sales. While the lure of USD$1 billion box offices might keep the big budget films off the servers for now, studios might start considering releasing their lower-budget films straight to digital to drive more subscription revenue.
More about movies in China:
- Forging nationalism through film
- Has China’s soft power grown in recent years?
- See how China and California collaborate and compete
- Hollywood Made In China looks at how China is shaping global media industries
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October 20, 2024
October 20, 2024
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Wednesday, November 20, 2024 - 3:00pm
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Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.