Regarding the Marvel movie "Shang Qi", there has been constant controversy since the establishment of the project.
And the main argument is that the movie’s villain Manchu archetype was originally created by the West, with a profound insult to China, Fu Manchu.
In addition, the protagonist of the movie Liu Simu's remarks "This movie was not made to please the Chinese audience" also caused dissatisfaction among many Chinese netizens.
After all, if the volume of the Korean movie market today is already the second largest in the world (second only to North America), it is impossible to say that Disney and Marvel do not pay attention to it.
And the hero of Shangqi is obviously also launched for the Chinese market.
But now it seems that Disney and Marvel have miscalculated this time.
However, recently, Tim Connors, the chief operating officer of Marvel Pictures, responded positively to the controversy about "Shangqi":
"Really, one At the beginning, our team members in the Beijing branch felt that the launch of "Shangqi" was a very wise decision. He is a hero with a positive image. The villain Manman himself is the enemy of Iron Man, so at first we were only worried about CN's propaganda. No matter how you look at him, we have also thought about adapting the Mandarin to a hero or a good person, rather than a villain."
"But the current situation really scares us a bit. We did not expect that the Chinese audience would treat the Mandarin to the Mandarin. With such a big controversy, they think that the appearance and behavior of the Mandarin is vilifying Chinese men. Not only does he have a slender beard, he always straightens it with his hands, and what he says is still very unnatural Chinese English, isn’t it? There will be a few Chinese proverbs.”
“Now it seems that letting the Mandarins be the villains is a high risk not only for us, but also for Disney. Gambling, it may cause Chinese audiences to oppose us, and worse, it will make us completely lose the Chinese market."
"We once discussed whether to let the characters speak Chinese in the movie, but later because of external opposition Let us give up this idea. For us, if we use Chinese "wrongly" in a movie, it may be counterproductive. Moreover, "Shang Qi" is not a special film in China. We have to consider the international market. The reason is that we still gave up the idea of Chinese."
"We once launched a fake Mandarin Chinese in "Iron Man 3". At that time, the feedback from the audience was to see the real Mandarin, we discussed this for a long time, and finally brought him in "Shang Qi", but we didn’t expect that it would become the current situation. We are really afraid of this, but we will never back down. We will deal with these controversial topics and work hard to polish the script. We hope to show a heroic story, not something else.”
Obviously, from Marvel’s response, we can Seeing a few key points
First, Marvel has always claimed that it really values the Chinese market, and even talked about the fact that it was originally intended to make the characters in the movie speak Chinese.
Second, their solution to the "Shangqi" dispute is to polish the script.
But, is this really useful?
In fact, since Marvel moved out of Manchu, it is destined to be unforgettable anyway.
plus the "affectionate confession" before starring Liu Simu, claiming that "Shang Qi" was shot for overseas Asians.
No matter how you look at it, it can be said that "Shang Qi" wants to win the favor of the audience from the heavens.
And when I saw "Shangqi" was really released, what would it be like?
