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ABSTRACT
The stagnation of the U.S. film, market opened doors for Hollywood to depend on Chinese significant huge revenues, investments, and growth opportunities. Hollywood becomes a destination for Chinese outbound capital. However, before and during the pandemic outbreak, it shows how incredibly vulnerable Hollywood is in accessing the world's biggest market. This study analyzes the challenges of the Hollywood film industry in China, such as rampant piracy, strict content censorship, USChina trade war, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. This study sheds light on the gaps in the existing US-China relationships in the film, industry. The original contribution of this research is to set guiding questions that can facilitate a strategic analysis of the film industry and how they will emerge from this crisis.
Keywords: Hollywood; Piracy; Censorship; US-China Trade War; COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak; China; film industry
INTRODUCTION
Global movie box office revenue reached a record of 42.5 billion dollars in 2019 with theatrical, home, and mobile entertainment combined; it has topped 100 billion dollars. The total cinema screens surpassed 200,000 in 2019, due to the 12% increase in the Asia Pacific region. However, the impact of the pandemic has suspended the Hollywood film industry, closing cinemas around the world due to COVID-19 crisis. Film festivals, awards and other film-related events have been canceled, halting film production as well as pushing back worldwide release dates of movies filming in 2020 (Stedman & McNary, 2020).
During the pandemic of Coronavirus Disease (COVID)-19, the Hollywood film industry faces many challenges, including each country's government implementation of required health and safety protection measures such as social distancing, lockdown, and curfew, which reduced production, demand, and supply chain disruptions. According to Christy Hoffman, UNI General Secretary said that cultural production would not automatically function as usual even after the crisis (UNI Global Union, 2020).
The challenge continuous for Hollywood to earn from their significant investment because they already capitalized and paid a lot of actors, actresses, and directors, whether on or off the camera. Moreover, they also support more than 2 million jobs (e.g., freelancers and self-employed workers across all business, creativity, and technical business activities) and 400,000 companies in America alone (Hall & Pasquin, 2020; Ouedraogo & Koffi, 2018; Nguyen & Le, 2019). The coronavirus definitely disrupted...