How Sony sanitised movie to please Chinese censors

In depth look into the major releases from Hollywood that were made palatable for the very lucrative Chinese market

HONG KONG/ LOS ANGELE: In a 2013 script for the movie Pixels, intergalactic aliens blast a hole in one of China’s national treasures — the Great Wall.

That scene is gone from the final version of the sci-fi comedy, starring Adam Sandler and released by Sony Pictures Entertainment this week in the United States. The aliens strike iconic sites elsewhere, smashing the Taj Mahal in India, the Washington Monument and parts of Manhattan.

Sony executives spared the Great Wall because they were anxious to get the movie approved for release in China, a review of internal Sony Pictures emails shows. It is just one of a series of changes aimed at stripping the movie of content that, Sony managers feared, Chinese authorities might have construed as casting their country in a negative light.

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Along with the Great Wall scene, out went a scene in which China was mentioned as a potential culprit behind an attack, as well as a reference to a “Communist-conspiracy brother” hacking a mail server — all to increase the chances of getting Pixels access to the world’s second-biggest box office.

“Even though breaking a hole on the Great Wall may not be a problem as long as it is part of a worldwide phenomenon, it is actually unnecessary because it will not benefit the China release at all. I would then, recommend not to do it,” Li Chow, chief representative of Sony Pictures in China, wrote in a December 2013 email to senior Sony executives.

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Li’s message is one of tens of thousands of confidential Sony emails and documents that were hacked and publicly released late last year. The US government blamed North Korea for the breach. In April, WikiLeaks published the trove of emails, memos and presentations from the Sony hack in an online searchable archive.

“We are not going to comment on stolen emails or internal discussions about specific content decisions,” said a spokesperson for Sony Pictures, a unit of Tokyo-based Sony Corp. “There are myriad factors that go into determining what is best for a film’s release, and creating content that has wide global appeal without compromising creative integrity is top among them.”

Chinese government and film-industry officials didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

A Palatable ‘Robocop’

Pixels wasn’t the only Sony movie in which the China content was carefully scrutinized. The emails reveal how studio executives discussed ways to make other productions, including the 2014 remake of RoboCop, more palatable to Chinese authorities.

In a 2013 email about RoboCop, the senior vice president at Sony Pictures Releasing International at the time, Steve Bruno, proposed relocating a multinational weapons conglomerate from China. His solution: Put it in a Southeast Asian country such as Vietnam or Cambodia. Ultimately, that change wasn’t made, a viewing of the movie shows. Bruno has since left Sony.

The Sony emails provide a behind-the-scenes picture of the extent to which one of the world’s leading movie studios exercised self-censorship as its executives tried to anticipate how authorities in Beijing might react to their productions. The internal message traffic also illustrates the deepening dependence of Hollywood on audiences in China, where box office receipts jumped by almost a third last year to $4.8 billion, as revenues in the United States and Canada shrank.

Other studios have made changes to movies in a bid to get them approved by Beijing, altering the version that is screened in China. A scene showing a Chinese doctor who helps the main character in Iron Man 3, for example, was lengthened in the Chinese version and included popular Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, a comparison of the Chinese and international versions shows. Produced by Marvel Studios, Iron Man 3 was the second top grossing movie in China in 2013. Marvel declined to comment.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2015.

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