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Fast and Furious star John Cena apologises for calling Taiwan a country
- King-Aaron 5y agoRidiculous. Clearly they want to capitalize on that sweet sweet Chinese box office money.
- fuzxi 5y agoIf you ever look at a AAA blockbuster and think, "Who are they making this schlock for?" >Over the last weekend, China accounted for $135 million of the movie's $162 million in revenue The answer is usually "a Chinese audience".
- totalZero 5y agoThat revenue number refers to a very limited group of foreign countries. "Universal’s high-octane action pic F9 has started its engines at the box office with a huge $162.4 million from a handful eight foreign markets, including $135.6 million from China alone. The latest installment in the Fast & Furious installment also debuted in South Korea, Russia, Hong Kong, Russia and the Middle East, all markets where moviegoing has rebounded from the COVID-19 crisis. F9‘s ticket sales were as strong as pre-pandemic times, and marked Universal’s best start in China behind the last Fast film. It is also the biggest showing in the pandemic-era for a Hollywood title." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-office-f9-fast-furious-f9-huge-start-1234957461/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-offi...
- dominicl 5y agoWould love to learn how this works behind the scenes. Are Chinese officials giving the Studio a deadline for this kind apology? Or is this proactive self-censorship triggered solely by social media?
- powerapple 5y agoit was triggered by social media. Chinese social media behave the same way as in US, except it spreads even faster times more population. John Cena actually went to China and learnt to speak Mandarin, but China is not a WWE market to be honest.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoThe major studios work very closely with Chinese Censorship board to get their movies cleared for China even during production and the board goes as far as changing scripts, characters and settings so this most likely came down from Chinese officials talking to the studio.
- Havoc 5y agoMore like studio goes here is your script for the statement read it or else
- randompwd 5y agoi think the term grovelingly apologises is more apt.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- akmarinov 5y ago> “Please say ‘Taiwan is part of China’ in Chinese. Otherwise, we will not accept your apology,” one Weibo user responded in a comment that was liked thousands of times.
- threatofrain 5y agoJohn Cena is active on the Chinese social media scene and has already apologized in Mandarin.
- sdrothrock 5y agoThat's why the comment is specific about what the writer wants to hear; his apology in Mandarin apologized repeatedly for making a mistake but didn't specifically say what the mistake was or say that Taiwan belongs to China.
- nonsen 5y agoWell at least there's that.
- King-Aaron 5y agoPluto is a planet
- 0x_rs 5y agoSuch things will never stop being utterly absurd to me. More often than not it seems that Taiwan is alone (particularly interesting was WHO's antics with covid-19 last year), and everybody plays pretend to please the CCP, and it's so obvious these statements are not well-intentioned, except for the purpose of profits (or political reasons). Pampering an authoritarian government.
- tibbydudeza 5y agoIt works - Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
- tibbydudeza 5y agoNot surprised as FSF 8 made $392,100,000 in China out of the total 1.2 billion boxoffice worldwide.
- egberts1 5y agoat the risk of overloading on -ism terminology, actions like John Cena have demonstrated that one can profit from criticizing non-totalitarianistic business climate while refraining from doing so within a totalitarianistic ones. Let’s hope that a non-totalitarianistic society can withstand such criticisms without compromising or negotiating its own value away in favor of totalitarianistic ones. A strange but harrowing (yet narrowing) position for corporate globalists (and their cohorts) to wiggle within.
- throw598765 5y agoMark Ruffalo apologized to Israel last week when he commented on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- LUmBULtERA 5y agoI love and respect the Chinese people. Yet, Taiwan is definitely a country.
- OldGoodNewBad 5y agoRemember when Obama’s State Department made the Red Dawn remake people switch the antagonist from China to North Korea? Cena was probably just doing what our government was told to make him do by China.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoI doubt it was the US government that told him to do it. It was the movie studio. China is a huge market for movies and it would jeopardize their profits if they pissed them off.
- jeegsy 5y agoThere are four lights!!!
- publicola1990 5y agoEven Taiwanese Government does not call Taiwan as a country, rather they call themselves as Republic of China and even claims all of the mainlands territory and citizenry as their own. Taiwanese themselves have not made up their mind till now officially on sovereignty.
- yladiz 5y agoNo, most Taiwanese have made up their mind and would like Taiwan to be recognized as an independent country, and do not consider themselves Chinese (as in mainland China). The issue is that as soon as the Taiwanese government said that they don’t claim China, it’s akin to claiming independence and China would possibly go to war.
- publicola1990 5y agoSeeing the Taiwanese politics, presently KMT is opposed to giving up the claims to mainland (KMT has historically ambitions of taking back mainland), and DPP are statusquoists, and there no significant political movement in Taiwan that is espousing Sovereignty. US itself has a "One China" policy.
- CogitoCogito 5y agoThe US’ One China policy is just to acknowledge that the PRC claims that Taiwan is its territory. The US has never recognized this claim.
- publicola1990 5y agoUS has also not recognised Taiwanese Sovereignty.
- CogitoCogito 5y agoI never said otherwise. I just wanted to readers to understand that the US One China policy is really to just not have official relations with the ROC. The policy is _not_ to recognize the PRC's claims to Taiwan as well as the other territories the ROC controls. You seem to apparently know this, but there is much confusion on the internet so I thought I'd clarify.