News culture Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: China’s exit compromised?
Released almost two weeks ago in our theaters, Shang-Chi got off to a very good start, even exceeding Disney’s expectations for the Western market. This nuance is important, because the film might never enter Chinese territory.
Originally scheduled to be released on Chinese New Year’s Day on February 12, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings a finally been postponed at the start of the school year, which obviously did not cause huge concerns with regard to the very good start of the movie. But Shang-Chi was supposed to be the Marvel movie to break all records in the Chinese market. Only the film did still no release date on the territory, and a new controversy may well jeopardize all its chances. Screenrant indeed reports that for a few days, an interview with Simu Liu from 2017 circulates on Chinese social networks, an interview in which the main actor of the film speaks of China as a “Third World country” where people are “dying of hunger”.
The latter was then based on the stories made by his parents, but the fact that this interview reappears could pose big problems for Chinese government institutions authorizing or not the release of foreign films. Our colleagues say that the case has already arisen with Nomadland, the film of Chloe Zhao, who also directs The Eternals. The Chinese government has yet to rule on the case of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, most a film release now seems compromised. To give an idea of the film’s success in other countries, he generated $ 146.2 million in total, including 90 million in North America alone during the four days of Labor Day Wekend.
