Iain Robert Smith, The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema

Abstract

When Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 reached mainland Chinese theatres in May 2013, the film looked somewhat different from the version that had opened around the world just days earlier. Showings began with an advertisement for Gu Li Duo, a Yili milk drink sipped by Dr Wu (Wang Xueqi), an ancillary character in the ‘international’ version of the film who features prominently in several scenes added to the Chinese release. In one such scene, a television in Wu’s office shows Iron Man at a Beijing landmark, surrounded by schoolchildren; in another, Wu operates on Iron Man alongside his assistant, Wu Jiaqi (played by mainland actress Fan Bingbing, who would return to Hollywood superheroics in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past). The Hollywood Reporter gauged Chinese bloggers’ ‘mixed reaction’ to the scenes, ‘which they believe are superfluous to the narrative [...] with many complaining about their country being represented on film by a ten-second presence of Wang, and the appearance of TV sets and mobile phones made by the Chinese manufacturers TCL’.1 Viewers outside of mainland China, meanwhile, got their own chance to weigh in when the scenes subsequently appeared as extras on the Blu-ray/DVD release of the movie, and then online, where YouTubers set about translating the sequences between frequent cries of ‘WTF?!’. In a representative example, commenter melediv exclaims, ‘Stop screwing up my movies, China! Leave Hollywood alone’,2 a complaint made all the more pointed by the fact that Iron Man 3 was jointly produced by Disney’s Marvel and Beijing’s DMG Entertainment.