Disney's US$200M Mistake

Mulan is out in theatres across China tomorrow... how will it do?

Disney's live-action remake Mulan is opening in theatres tomorrow in China, but there is so much controversy around the film that one wonders if the movie studio will ever make back the US$200 million it spent to make it.

Donnie Yen enthusiastically shaking Xi Jinping's hand

Already last year pro-democracy Hongkongers were determined to boycott the film after actress Liu Yifei, who plays Mulan, supported the police and their excessive force during the protests last summer on her Weibo account.

Protesters were also not impressed with actor Donnie Yen who has written social media posts praising Beijing, and there's a video clip of him shaking Chinese President Xi Jinping's hand and not wanting to let go...

But now after months of delay due to the coronavirus pandemic, Mulan is finally out, and the credits have rolled to reveal Disney thanked eight government entities in Xinjiang, including the public security bureau in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang where several internment camps have been documented. Another credit went to the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department in Xinjiang.

Detention camps were only 7km from where Disney filmed

At the time Disney filmed Mulan, probably around 2018, did studio executives know what was going on in the region where its Uighur residents are under severe repression and surveillance? Shawn Zhang, the graduate student who has studied satellite maps on Xinjiang to find the internment camps, says the film crew were a few only 7 kilometres from an internment camp.

Critics are also blasting the studio for kowtowing to the Chinese government.

Isaac Stone Fish is a senior fellow at the Asia Society, and in a column in the Washington Post he wrote: "It's sufficiently astonishing that it bears repeating. Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world's worst human rights abuses happening today."

Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, who lives in Australia satirizes the film by depicting Mulan as a guard in one of the internment camps in Xinjiang.

Badiucao's satirical take on Mulan in Xinjiang

"It's very problematic and there's no excuse. I mean, it's clear, we have all the evidence showing what is going on in Xinjiang," he said.

Badiucao also accused Disney of "double standards", embracing western social justice movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter, while turning a blind eye to China's rights abuses.

However it's not just Disney to blame for bending to Beijing. In the upcoming Tom Cruise film Top Gun: Maverick, the Taiwanese flag that was on his bomber jacket in the original movie has been digitally erased, and the storyline in the 2013 film World War Z removed China as the source of a zombie virus.

And it's not just Hongkongers who are boycotting the film, but also activists in Taiwan and Thailand.

So any bets on how well Mulan will do?

If anything this fiasco sheds more light on the horrific plight of Uighurs to the rest of the world, at Disney's expense, at the tune of US$200 million.