Why China is Right to Give Star Wars the Cold Shoulder
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opened in China with a gross of just over $28 million in it’s first weekend. The next weekend gross fell to just under $2.5 million dollars, an absurd 91.3% drop. The weekend after it didn’t surpass the one-million-dollar mark. This is not a new trend, The Force Awakens’ bowed from Chinese theaters at $124 million in 2015, respectable but below forecasts. Rogue One earned $69 million the year after, a more obvious disappointment. The Last Jedi will not even get near that figure this year. Clearly, Star Wars movies have failed to resonate with Chinese audiences but is this important? The current world wide gross for The Last Jedi is almost $1.3 billion, the franchise is doing fine. Why does it matter?
Financially, fine is an understatement. A Star Wars movie has finished as the highest domestic grossing film the last three years in a row, two of them sit in the top ten world wide grosses of all time. Even if it isn’t catching on in China, the second biggest film market in the world, should this really be cause for concern? The short answer is yes, because it points to a fundamentally flawed ideology in the way one of our biggest cinema institutions is telling one of our biggest stories. Telling good stories is imperative to society.
The first Star Wars movie was released in 1977. This was the start of the original trilogy, one of the great pop culture enterprises that exist throughout film history. It burst onto the scene with such novel authenticity society could not help but adore it. This Western phenomenon never reached China during a time of strict government regulation. In the 2000’s the trilogy of Star Wars prequels did make it to China but in the form of a quiet quota release and a flaccid response. Since than China’s financial influence in the international distribution market has grown and so too has Disney’s desire to effectively reach them.
In an effort to make the new Star Wars franchise connect with Chinese audiences Disney decided to market the film as if the story already connected with them. Based on reminiscence alone, Star Wars can practically sell itself around the world today. Everywhere except China. Disney knew Chinese audiences lacked the nostalgia that most other countries had for the franchise so they attempted to overcome this obstacle by investing even more heavily in the marketing the new films. Major cities were saturated with Star Wars iconography. Ad space on every wall, screen, and publication was bought until there was nowhere to turn without looking at some piece of the Star Wars story. At one point 500 storm troopers were lined up on the Great Wall. The marketing was aggressive as if to try and manufacture a Star Wars culture commercially. The early response was promising but instead of the franchise catching on with each successive new film the financial numbers continue to indicate a downward trend in interest.
What the new Star Wars movies failed to do was tell a story that made the audiences want to come back for the next one. Instead of welcoming them into the story Chinese audiences felt shut out. Call backs and inside jokes from the original stories played to hardcore fan nostalgia but fell flat with audiences newly experiencing Star Wars. You can not recreate the feeling of growing up with a good story but you can provide a new one that speaks for itself. China has still not received a story that aspires to the same genuine originality as the series they missed back in 1977. In this case it appears the power of storytelling was grossly underestimated.
There is something inherently human in the ability to tell stories. A quality that manages to transcend pure facts by imbuing within cold figures a relative understanding only replicated in the human touch. To really understand how important stories are we can look at our history with them since their earliest inception. The Atlantic published an article titled The Psychological comforts of Story Telling in which many vital qualities of the craft are explored. The article examines how early civilizations used stories to teach lessons, combining both emotion and data to truly resonate within society. The emotional component elevates a lesson into a connection that is never truly reached by a perfunctory statistic. According to Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, people recall information coalesced into narratives “up to 22 times more than facts alone.”
For instance, if I were to say, “There’s an animal near that tree, so don’t go over there,” it would not be as effective as if I were to tell you, “My cousin was eaten by a malicious, scary creature that lurks around that tree, so don’t go over there.”
Besides the practical lessons a story provides, researchers have discovered another important and subtle benefit of good storytelling. Stories allow passage into the mindset and perspective of others, and with it, development in our ability to empathize. We see things that we can relate to and things that challenge us to think differently. This is especially true for subjects learning about those different from themselves in creed, culture, or sexual orientation. This empathy was shown to spill out into the “real world” after studies revealed participants highly absorbed in a story were twice as likely to help pick up pens that were “accidentally” dropped by the tester.
Stories help us learn about the world and stories help us learn about ourselves but perhaps their greatest feature is their ability to connect us geographically and temporally. We know different cultures have a knack for repeating similar stories, the same holds true through varying generations of society. Stories are passed down through history, passed from nation to nation, and weaved together to create a shared history throughout humanity. Stories outlast their storytellers, they can live as time capsules providing historical enlightenment or grow and evolve to fit the narrative of the current generation. With such cultural significance, the job of the storytellers has always been one afforded great respect and even celebrity in society. Storytellers have a responsibility to the public beyond simple entertainment.
A film’s job, first and foremost, is to tell a story. Just like generations before them our modern day storytellers are tasked with creating content that resonates with audiences and crafts truth out of fiction. We live in an age of technology that provides, among many other things, unparalleled interconnectivity. We have massive institutions with the power and resources to make almost any imagination into a moving image on the screen. It is important to remember that the movie business is indeed a business, this grows more obvious by the day. However, China’s indifference to the commoditization of storytelling points to a beautifully human inheritance. Humanity still yearns for something we can connect to and it can’t be faked. Maybe us fortunate enough to recall the significance of the old Star Wars stories can still feel some of the old shine in the new movies but know that it is not out of line to ask for more. Storytellers can not buy their way to human connection but they can earn it. If the Chinese audience doesn’t “get it” the fault lies with the storytellers not the listeners. It is a disservice to society if we forget the power and importance of a good story.