Everyone Wants to Sell Something on the Back of Star Wars. So Why Isn't It Big in China?

This article explains why Star Wars is a hit around the world, yet in China it "lacks a mass base."

"May the Force be with you."

The greatest distance in the world is the one that opens up when people hear this line: on one side of the planet, a crowd screams with excitement; on the other, people have no idea what anyone is talking about.

All right, one more explanation. This is the blessing the Jedi give one another in Star Wars, and they often say it instead of "goodbye" when they part... Ah, that's already too much. Someone has surely closed this page in irritation at these baffling sentences.

Frankly, this is the predicament Star Wars faces in China. The latest installment, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, opens in North America on December 18. Its trailer came out a few days ago, and the film's title was mentioned 390,000 times on Twitter.

Americans are wildly enthusiastic about this film, and the noisy marketing campaigns around it have been running for the better part of six months. HP, Sony, Uniqlo, Uber and LEGO have all launched Star Wars products, and there are themed headphones, game consoles, toasters and even passenger jets.

"The world is flat." Highly globalized companies like LEGO and Uniqlo would surely not forget to bring this excitement to China. We did hear that Uniqlo's T-shirts sold well earlier. Apart from that, there seems to be nothing the general public could call "hot."

Disney, which owns the rights to the film, has tried hard. On October 22, 500 Stormtrooper figures lined the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. It was an imposing sight: four beacon towers lit up the four Chinese characters for "The Force Awakens," and hundreds of Star Wars fans stood on site holding red and blue lightsabers. Disney staged the event to promote Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

500 Stormtroopers on the Great Wall

Yet in the week of the Great Wall event, the overall Baidu search index for Star Wars was 9,055, while the week's peak search index was 1.12 million. The comparison says enough.

We interviewed Ding Yan, an executive officer of the Rebel Alliance garrison of the 501st Legion in China. The 501st Legion is a Star Wars fan group with 7,000 members worldwide, 48 of them in China. The Chinese branch was founded in 2009, when the group already had four or five thousand members around the world. Ding fell in love with Star Wars in first grade. Back then almost nobody around him shared his passion, so he expressed it by buying toys, "just like other kids loved Transformers." Only when the internet arrived did he meet other Star Wars fans, on toy forums.

As we said at the start, Star Wars does not have a broad mass base in China. At first glance this seems odd: China is a gold mine for the entertainment industry, so how could anyone miss it?!

This article will give you the answer.

1. Star Wars took off in 1977... you know what that means, right?

Many directors pour out praise whenever they talk about Star Wars, much as the singer you like today might keep bringing up John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Steven Spielberg believes it influenced many of his science fiction films, and J.J. Abrams feels it changed him completely. And so 1977 became the most unforgettable turning point in many people's lives.

Star Wars shaped American culture so deeply because it created a turning point, and from that a trend. Before 1977, science fiction films were B movies (films shot quickly on low budgets). Then science fiction ushered in the era of the commercial blockbuster. The special effects dazzled audiences, tastes gradually shifted from films about states of mind toward more entertaining ones, and the audience kept growing. Star Wars built a vast, intricate world unlike anything seen before. Viewers could find their own emotional connection in it, and the children who grew up under its spell would pass it on to the next generation.

And what was China doing then? In 1977 the Cultural Revolution had just ended, the college entrance exam had just been restored, intellectuals had just been given a little room to speak, and "reform and opening up" had just begun to be mentioned in public. People who loved culture, art and entertainment were still a long way from seeing a film like Star Wars. Even those secretly reading banned books under the covers could not have imagined that people elsewhere were queuing around the block for a story about rebels fighting an emperor.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace opened in mainland China on November 5, 1999.

The first revenue-sharing foreign film shown in Chinese cinemas was The Fugitive in 1994, and by coincidence it starred Harrison Ford, the lead of the first Star Wars. The first Star Wars film released in Chinese cinemas was 1999's Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Then came 2005's Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, the last of the series, which opened in China at the same time as the rest of the world. Its opening weekend took 28 million yuan, putting China in the top ten countries worldwide for that weekend, the first time an imported film's box office in China had made the global rankings.

But the result could have been better. The earlier films had never been released in Chinese cinemas. Most Chinese people discovered them slowly through VHS tapes, later discs and downloads, and China Central Television (CCTV) also aired the Star Wars series. But in many people's minds it was never a complete story.

2. "The good times for China's film market" came in 2009, but by then Star Wars was in a lull

By the end of 2008, everyone, whether they made films in China, watched them, or came to China to invest in them, breathed a sigh of relief. By then mainland China had 5,000 cinema screens, and its film market was booming for real. Soon Avatar would take 1.38 billion yuan, and later Transformers 4 1.97 billion yuan. By then the last of the six Star Wars films was already four years old.

In fact, Star Wars became a talking point again thanks to Disney, which bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for US$4.05 billion, and this IP (intellectual property, a much-abused term) once more came into its own. Disney announced a new director and a reboot of the Star Wars series. Only then, as geeks, otaku and science fiction fans came out cheering (they really are the core of Star Wars fandom), did most people grasp how important the series was.

In August 2015, Douglas Reilly, Disney's director of brand management for Lucasfilm characters, said the company was looking for suitable partners in China. It hoped to raise Star Wars' brand awareness in China and make good use of the IP. The timing seemed perfect. China's box office in the first half of 2015 was 20.363 billion yuan, 53.1% of it from Hollywood films. In China today, an ordinary Hollywood film with special effects, superheroes and science fiction elements tends to do well; in the first half of the year Avengers: Age of Ultron took 1.46 billion yuan on the mainland. It looked as though Star Wars: The Force Awakens might be in luck.

3. So the core fans should be people born in the 1970s, but China's box office is driven by people born in the 1980s and 1990s

In April 2015, when the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was unveiled at the convention center in Anaheim, California, J.J. Abrams was asked, "How do you make sure old and new audiences are all satisfied?" He gave a cool answer: "We just will." At the launch, packed with Star Wars fans, every cheer during the trailer came at a moment that echoed the earlier films: Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, saying "Chewie, we're home," or the appearance of classic figures such as the Stormtroopers and Chewbacca.

You may remember the Uniqlo T-shirt printed with the line "I am your father," which was fairly popular on Chinese social media at the time. In a country steeped in Star Wars culture, people buy it because of the characters' family history in the film; in China, most people buy it because of how it looks on them.

The "I am your father" T-shirt launched by Uniqlo and Disney

In China, how do you pass this excitement on to young audiences used to spending their box-office money on Harry Potter and The Hunger Games? If they do not understand Darth Vader, a complex character with a tormented inner life, what reason do even those who might like the film have to pay for it? This year's China Film Industry Research Report says people born in the 1980s and 1990s together accounted for 77% of the box office. Will this group come to like Star Wars?

4. When we say "lacks a mass base," there is no getting around the "science fiction mass base"

In China, the science fiction film Avatar is not a science fiction film. It is "the movie by the guy who made Titanic that tons of foreigners went to see and that you can watch on a huge screen." In China, the science fiction film The Avengers is not a science fiction film. It is "the movie where lots of superheroes squabble, it's kind of funny, and two of them have a bromance." In China, the science fiction film Transformers is not a science fiction film. It is "the movie with spectacular visuals that feels like better value for money than other films."

When those science fiction films reach China, most are understood as spectacle films; people go for the spectacle, not the science fiction. When Star Wars comes to China, its science fiction side will naturally be played down too. But as a film that played an important part in the history of Hollywood science fiction, its popularity is closely tied to science fiction fans, and enjoying it may even take some understanding of science fiction.

The Star Wars trilogy brought Hollywood science fiction into the age of commercial production. It earned an unexpectedly large box office (the first film took US$775 million on a US$11 million budget). Before it, most science fiction films were B movies. From Star Wars on, science fiction became more imaginative and more demanding about special effects (at the time no one had even thought of attempting the kind of effects Industrial Light & Magic produced), and it changed the science fiction films that followed.

A statue of the Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks in the Industrial Light & Magic office

That revolution seemed to have nothing to do with China. In 1977, Xie Jin's Youth, starring Chen Chong and Zhang Yu, opened in Chinese cinemas: the story of a peasant's daughter who gives her youth to the revolution. Mention Chinese science fiction films today and the first thing many of us think of may be Liu Cixin's six-part Three-Body series, due to be adapted for the screen, and we mention it with rather mixed feelings.

If you cannot make science fiction films, the ground in which science fiction audiences might grow goes to waste. And making science fiction films may require a technological foundation. Americans can imagine industrial-age manufacturing and outer space because they lived through that era early and in earnest. Then there is the demand for special effects, where China generally lacks experience. And there must be an environment that puts no limits on imagination: to reach the core of science fiction takes long, bold thinking. All of these are the foundations of science fiction.

So engaging science fiction is still a niche today; or rather, "understanding science fiction" is a niche in China.

5. Speaking of understanding, the world of Star Wars is actually quite complex

The world of the Harry Potter series is also vast and complex, full of metaphors and ideas drawn from history, culture and politics. But it is set in a school and aimed at teenagers, so even though it carries a lot of information, each element is fairly easy to grasp. Dark magic, for example, stands for crime, and the series deals very concretely with human nature, ideology and race. In effect it transplants our own universe.

Transformers is even more obvious. Many Transformers names are hard to remember, such as Unicron, Primus and The Fallen, but none of that needs to be understood. Broadly, it is about punishing evil and rewarding good: the good robots huff and puff their way to beating the bad ones, and the good robots must be brave and upright, protect the environment, and know how to sacrifice themselves... all very wholesome.

Star Wars, by contrast, feels unfamiliar. It is a war between one alien world and another, and even its most basic term, "the Force," is hard to grasp. The word means a mysterious energy field that exists everywhere in this universe; that is the Force. Without the Force, the worlds among the stars would perish. It is something like the universe's "Pillar that Steadies the Sea," the magic staff from Chinese myth. And do you know what "training in the Force" is? It is rather like the pilgrimage to the West in Journey to the West. The film's heroes, the Jedi, must go through a period of training to become accomplished Jedi Masters, and must not be impatient along the way. One exceptionally gifted student ignored his master's advice and was too eager for quick results, and in the end... any more would be a spoiler.

6. To build a mass base in China, this is what it takes

Besides arriving when Chinese cinema is booming, a film (all right, let us use that word one more time: an IP) catches on because of a few traits: a deep emotional bond, being easy to understand, a young audience, and the ability to become a popular toy.

Transformers is a toy boys love; Transformers were toys to begin with. In 1984, to promote its Transformers toys, Hasbro made a three-episode cartoon that aired on American television and topped the ratings. A few years later they brought the Transformers cartoon to China, and from then on boys there began to know it.

That is the emotional bond. Harry Potter is the same: it draws teenagers in with details of school and magic, things they love. In 2000 the first three Harry Potter books were published in China, and seven years later the series had sold more than 9 million copies there.

A young audience matters a great deal, and if the audience is small children, things are simpler still. Family films are the easiest for whole families to go and see together, and afterwards the children clamor for toys; that is how a good IP is grown. Take Pixar's Cars: although its reviews were poor, its merchandise ranked among Disney's best-selling licensed products. In 2010, the year before Cars 2 opened, merchandise sales reached US$2.5 billion, behind only names such as Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Snow White and Barbie.

Even if Star Wars could build all of this "broad mass base," it could hardly do so in just one year.