Wang Jianlin Went to Los Angeles to "Scare" Hollywood. Has Chinese Cinema's Swagger Really Grown This Big?

Hollywood has stayed fairly restrained about this loud-talking rich man.

The Hollywood Reporter was founded in 1930, only seven years after the giant letters spelling HOLLYWOOD went up on the hillside. For more than eighty years since, it has recorded the changes on that patch of land, and turned itself from a newspaper into a magazine along the way.

On November 2, the magazine ran the first cover in its history with an ethnic Chinese figure on it. Wang Jianlin stands with his arms folded, his face stern, looking somewhere past the camera. In the bottom-right corner are the words "The Chairman." In Chinese, chairman can be rendered as dongshizhang, the head of a company's board, or as zhuxi, the title reserved for the country's leader. Either way, the word means power.

In the story, The Hollywood Reporter lays out plainly everything Wanda has done in Hollywood: the $2.6 billion purchase of AMC Theatres, the $3.5 billion purchase of Legendary Entertainment, the $1 billion purchase of Dick Clark Productions, and the $8.2 billion studio complex it is building in Qingdao, which it calls the largest in the world.

But whenever Wang Jianlin himself comes up, The Hollywood Reporter adds a small detail. When Wang lists the Hollywood stars he likes, the piece notes that he says the names "dryly." Or take the first line of the article: "Wang Jianlin, China's richest man, doesn't usually go to the movies."

The Hollywood Reporter chooses its words carefully. In other coverage Wang Jianlin looks far more arrogant. The Wall Street Journal wrote: "China's richest man has a message for Hollywood: We're here to stay, so learn to play our game."

The New York Times put it this way: "Mr. Wang flew into Hollywood on his private jet over the weekend to close Wanda's latest deal — the $1 billion purchase of Dick Clark Productions — and to dangle a giant carrot in front of Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Universal Pictures and Disney."

You may remember what Wang Jianlin said about Disney before Shanghai Disneyland opened: even a strong tiger is no match for a pack of wolves. For Hollywood, Wanda is a complicated thing to have around. It could be the American studios' key to the Chinese market, or it could be a self-important Chinese financier telling Hollywood how to run its business. This time, though, the problem looks like more than Wang Jianlin talking big.

As The Hollywood Reporter counted it, Wang Jianlin and Wanda have already put more than $7 billion into Hollywood itself, and that figure leaves out what Wanda has invested in individual films such as Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. One thing Wang keeps repeating, in one setting after another, is that Wanda's next target is the Big Six.

Disney, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures take in roughly 80 percent of the North American box office. To Americans they are not only large companies; they stand for American culture. Hollywood has never stopped fearing that this culture might be invaded.

Now that Wang Jianlin has arrived, the scene does look at first glance like a remake of the Japanese invasion of Hollywood thirty-odd years ago. In 1989 Sony bought Columbia Pictures for $3.5 billion, and Matsushita followed by buying MCA/Universal for $6.6 billion. Both deals set Hollywood's teeth on edge. "Some Americans warned that Japanese companies were likely to place restrictions on film content."

That wariness runs even deeper when Hollywood faces Wanda. Americans have long seen "Red China" as a country without free speech, where film has always been a controlled product. A billboard on Sunset Boulevard read: "China's Red Puppet: AMC Theatres." The target was Wanda.

Whether the other country is China or Japan, of course, American worry about who controls the content is really worry about another country's power. China today, like Japan thirty-odd years ago, is at the height of its national strength, and the vanity of a country in a hurry to prove itself shows up most clearly in big acquisitions all over the world.

Japan was once said to be able to buy half of America, and at one point it owned a landmark like Rockefeller Center. Now the story is repeating. In 2015 Chinese companies did 579 outbound investment and acquisition deals worth more than $54 billion: Anbang Insurance buying Fidelity & Guaranty Life for $1.57 billion, ChemChina buying Pirelli for $8 billion, Greenland Group taking over large blocks of Brooklyn, New York. All of it makes it easy for Americans to feel Chinese money closing in, and easy for them to find Wanda's current posture in Hollywood familiar.

Unlike thirty years ago, though, Hollywood expected nothing from Japan and now wants the Chinese market badly. With its home market flat, the studios have to earn more overseas, and that makes China impossible to avoid.

Last summer QDaily spent more than a month in Hollywood. Everyone we met knew something about China. Todd Hoffman, a talent agent, told us: "Everyone in Hollywood says they want to do business with China."

That is easy to understand. China has entertainment money pouring in and mature, cheap technical outsourcing. But what attracts Hollywood most is the size of the market itself: more than 30,000 screens and the more than 40 billion yuan in ticket sales they can produce.

Wang Jianlin knows this, and it has done nothing but help him over Hollywood's threshold. Philippe Dauman, chief executive of Viacom, one of the world's largest media groups, pushed hard at one point to sell 49 percent of Paramount, and Wanda was considered one of the likeliest buyers. Then Viacom's controlling shareholder, Sumner Redstone, forced Dauman out, and the deal died.

Soon after, Wanda reached a deal with Sony Pictures: from now on Sony will let Wanda take equity stakes in the films it makes. The partnership also includes something Hollywood cares about a great deal — Sony will try to work Chinese elements into the films Wanda invests in.

In the same Hollywood Reporter story, Wang Jianlin's Hollywood strategy is called aggressive: "[Wanda] isn't going to wait for one of the Big Six to put itself up for sale. Wang Jianlin has decided to act aggressively now. He has already assembled a fund worth several billion dollars, ready to pour his capital into the slates of Hollywood's Big Six."

Without Wang Jianlin's Los Angeles speech, The Hollywood Reporter might have sat on that cover story a while longer.

Two weeks earlier, facing the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and executives from Warner Bros., Sony, 21st Century Fox, Lionsgate and other studios, Wang Jianlin explained things the way a patient teacher would: "If you want a share of the Chinese market, if you want to make money there, you have to understand Chinese audiences, you have to find ways to please Chinese audiences. So the best approach is to add Chinese elements to American Hollywood films, especially the big ones. How do you add them? That's for you to work out. It means combining with China. You can't say, 'I'm only here to scoop money out of the market, but I don't care about your tastes, I don't care about your audience.'"

After speaking in general terms about why China's box office will reach $30 billion within a decade, Wang Jianlin passed on some of his "life experience," instructing Hollywood on how to share in the Chinese film pie.

"A lot of American film companies may think they know China well. But in my years of dealing with people in Hollywood, I've found that Hollywood is badly short of professionals who really understand the Chinese market. A lot of them sit in Los Angeles and imagine what the Chinese market is like."

"How did Hollywood, the best storyteller there was, turn into a place that cares too much about technology and spectacle? Has Hollywood stopped knowing how to tell a story? So it relies entirely on IP sequels, on spectacle, on technology. That worked in China a few years ago, but Chinese audiences are getting smarter, so they're not so easy to fool now. If you want a share of the Chinese pie, you have to be able to tell stories. Hollywood needs to get back on the track of telling stories."

"A lot of technical people may never get their break in Hollywood, may never make that much money. But if they come to Oriental Movie Metropolis, their day may come, they may make more money, and the conditions may be better."

"Everyone thinks Chinese cinema is still the student and Hollywood is the teacher. How can a student stand here and tell the teacher to improve the quality of its product?" That was the excuse Wang Jianlin gave for the lecture: in his view Hollywood today is nothing but IP sequels, which is why he warned it to "get back on the track of telling stories."

In fairness, apart from skating over the part about adding Chinese elements, Entrepreneur Wang's remarks are not unreasonable. Coming out of Wang Jianlin's mouth, though, they have a strong flavor of black comedy. Of the films Wanda has produced, the top earner, Mojin: The Lost Legend, was adapted from the novel Ghost Blows Out the Light; the second, Warcraft, from the game of the same name; the third, Goodbye Mr. Loser, from a stage play that came first. All fine examples of the IP economy.

Since Wang Jianlin doesn't watch movies, he may not know that Li Bingbing and Han Geng's scenes in Transformers: Age of Extinction were the film's biggest joke in China. Otherwise he might have been more careful when he raised the subject of Chinese elements.

He may also lack a good enough brain trust. Someone should have reminded him that Zootopia, a Hollywood cartoon released in March, traditionally a dead month, is the second-highest-grossing film in China this year, while Wanda's own Fast Gun, Fast Draw (《快手枪手快枪手》) flopped this summer with critics and at the box office. Comparing the two isn't fair. But before warning that Hollywood needs to get back to storytelling, Wang Jianlin should recognize that next to the current standard of Chinese cinema, Hollywood is, as the saying goes, a camel that has starved to death and is still bigger than a horse.

Wang Jianlin cannot really be unaware of any of this. But the nerve of a rich man — above all a rich man who stands for the Chinese market — was enough to make him call a press conference in Los Angeles to share his earnest hopes for Hollywood.

Wang Jianlin says only what he most wants to say. Given Wanda's record and standing in the film business, arrogance like this is puzzling but not surprising. In his eyes, film is a bit player. In 2015 the commercial property business built around Wanda Plaza brought in more than 190 billion yuan, while film and television brought in barely more than 6 billion.

Film may be a small bet Wang Jianlin is placing to balance his risk. The commercial property business is not solid. E-commerce has drained foot traffic out of the malls, and the expectation that China's economy may slow further has held back Wanda Plaza's expansion. Wang Jianlin needs a new business to fill the gap.

In an interview with The New York Times, Wang Jianlin called himself an "angel investor." He asked people to note that the assets Wanda buys are companies in trouble — AMC Theatres and Legendary Entertainment among them — and that Wanda is what pulled them out.

That may be true of AMC Theatres: in the year the deal closed, it swung from a $200 million loss the year before to a $58 million profit. Legendary Entertainment is less clear. In all of 2016 Legendary released one film, Warcraft, which cost $160 million and took $433 million worldwide. Not much of a result.

The Times also noticed that Wang Jianlin seems to have grown more modest: "Mr. Wang, speaking to a Times reporter through an interpreter, clearly understood that a little less bluster might make Wanda's road ahead smoother."

Wang Jianlin once said of Disney: "This is no longer the age of going crazy for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and following them blindly. That age is over." Now he says: "We respect Disney."

On this trip to Los Angeles he even found a chance to meet Disney's chairman, Robert Iger. In the photograph taken afterward, both men are grinning.

It is worth remembering that in 1995 Matsushita, unable to close the cultural gap, sold Universal Pictures and pulled out of Hollywood for good. Sony has kept its stake in Columbia Pictures, but Tokyo has stayed out of the day-to-day operations entirely; it said nothing even in 2014, when a hacking attack threw Sony Pictures into crisis. Sony's position was that the studio's problems were "an American problem," best handled by Americans.

The Japanese didn't pull it off. Can Wang Jianlin?