SAVING HOLLYWOOD FROM THE CHINESE BOX OFFICE:

The rise of moviegoers in China has created an incentive for Hollywood to make movies that appeal to Chinese audiences as well as Western ones. There are so many entertainment options now, and marketing costs have become so astronomical, that Hollywood has decided to play it safe and focus on large, well-established franchises for movies and sequels. Put all this together and you get a lot of movies like the latest Transformers installment, which dominated the Chinese box office but barely registered in the U.S.

Now the news is that the latest Star Wars movie fell flat in China. Its opening weekend haul there was barely half of what the previous installment garnered a couple years ago. I fear eventually this means that future Star Wars movies will look a lot more like Transformers movies (less talk, more boom), and in the long run everything will become some version of robot dinosaurs fighting or a “Wolf Warrior” sequel.

Also, to be blunt, Hollywood just sucks.