Commentary
NEW YORK (May 27)—Recent news is that Tencent Pictures, a film distributor and production group owned by the Shenzhen-based Chinese technology giant, has dropped financing of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the widely anticipated sequel to the 1986 smash hit film about U.S. Navy aviators at the advanced Fighter Weapons School. Reports say that Tencent thought it was risking the wrath of CCP officials by portraying U.S. military strength in a favorable light.
Hollywood has been an obsequious vassal to the CCP—or more accurately, CCP censors—for at least 25 years. In trailers for the “Maverick” sequel, eagle-eyed observers noted that actor Tom Cruise’s leather jacket—his father’s—dropped the Taiwan and Japan flag patches that had appeared in the original film, replacing them with indistinguishable patches with a similar color scheme. As noted by Mark MacKinnon of the Toronto Globe & Mail in 2019….