I had to laugh a little when I saw the trailer for The Great Wall last weekend. They put Matt Damon in an otherwise mostly Chinese movie about the building of The Great Wall? Oh, wow, the internet is going to love that. Hear, hear for white savior narratives!
Here's the trailer:According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Great Wall is a $160m-budgeted co-production and the biggest movie collaboration between the U.S. and China ever. It will come out in China in December, and two months later Universal will drop it in the US and Canada.
In addition to Matt Damon, the cast also includes Willem Defoe, Pablo Pascal and a whole slew of notable Asian stars like Andy Lau, Lu Han, Eddie Peng and Jing Tian. It's being described as a 3D fantasy adventure-monster period action film dramatizing the mysteries surrounding the origins of the Great Wall of China during the Northern Song Dynasty, and in grand Chinese movie fashion their version of the story involves fending off nasty monsters.
The incongruous presence of Matt Damon combined with the signature visual tics of legendary Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou ( House of Flying Daggers) gives this the feel of a movie-length version of one of those super weird Japanese TV commercials starring American celebrities clearly moonlighting in a completely different culture in exchange for a big paycheck. However, with China's ongoing efforts to take over the entertainment world we're probably going to see far more cinematic experiments like this in the years to come.
Fresh Off the Boat 's Constance Wu predictably weighed in with a no-nonsense take on the issue, and is simply done with any financially-based explanations for why stories about people of color must be packaged with white movie stars to guard against financial risk:
Here's the thing, though: The Great Wall isn't simply more of the same old whitewashing. This isn't 47 Ronin or The Last Samurai again. Those were American movies written, directed and produced by white people and starring a seemingly white male star (to be fair to 47 Ronin, Keanu Reeves is half-Hawaiian with Chinese ancestry). The Great Wall, on the other hand, has a Chinese director, Chinese film crew, was filmed in China and was backed largely by Chinese money. A couple of the stars might be white and the same goes for the screenwriters, but this is really a major Chinese film which managed to secure global distribution from an American studio.
To make The Great Wall, the Chinese film companies Le Vision Pictures and China Film Group partnered with Legendary Entertainment, the Burbank-based financier responsible for Crimson Peak, Jurassic World, The Dark Knight and Warcraft, to name a few. After years of partnering with WB, Legendary signed a five-year pact with Universal Pictures in 2014 with Universal agreeing to market and distribute Legendary's movies worldwide. However, Legendary was purchased for $3.5 billion by China's Wanda Group earlier this year. Even though Legendary continues to operate independently the plan is to eventually integrate it into Wanda's entertainment business.
And China is sick of its movies making next to nothing outside of the country. Since 2013, 27 Chinese movies have grossed at least $100m in the country, and the highest any of them has ever grossed in the US/Canada is the $3.2m The Mermaid made earlier this year. That's compared to the stunning $526m The Mermaid made in China. At least The Mermaid managed a domestic theatrical run at all. 10 of the 27 films never failed to secure such distribution.
So, regardless of how galling it might be from a cultural point of view or how completely fed up you might be with financial excuses for whitewashing in films the answer to why they put Matt Damon into a Chinese movie about the building of The Great Wall lies in the sad domestic stats for China's biggest films of the past 4 years:
* Stars Chow Yun-fat, the Asian actor who briefly crossed over into American films before returning to Hong Kong
** Stars Jackie Chan
As per Constance Wu's statement, the counter to all of this might be that they never tried hard enough with any of those other movies, even when they did secure the services of some American actors (e.g., how many people outside of China and online film forums have heard of Skiptrace or Dragon Blade?). And them slotting Matt Damon into The Great Wall is another case of not trying hard enough.
The Great Wall will perhaps be a good learning experience for all involved, specifically that they'll need to find more organic, culturally sensitive ways to weave in American movie stars to these co-productions. That is if, indeed, The Great Wall turns out to be a traditional white savior narrative (remember, all we really have to go off of at the moment is this relatively short trailer).