Post-COVID Hollywood in China: Market Decline, Shifting Policies, and Audience Critiques

Abstract

This article explores post-COVID transformations in Hollywood-China relations by analyzing qualitative audience data collected from questionnaires and group interviews and by comparing these findings with journalistic and industry reports. It foregrounds the significance and complexity of Chinese viewers’ engagements with Hollywood movies beyond what is captured in quantitative market statistics. Drawing on concepts of the multidimensional identities of contemporary movie audiences under cultural globalization, the article argues that Chinese audiences of Hollywood movies act simultaneously as cosmopolitan consumers and citizens whose cultural identities do not necessarily adhere to Party ideology and national belonging; instead, they are shaped through consumption and reception practices amid transnational flows of cultural products. While Chinese audiences generally regard Hollywood movies as media products with high entertainment and aesthetic value, the post-COVID trend of growing “dislike” toward Hollywood nonetheless expresses an increasingly negative imagination—an imagination itself constantly mediated through global mass media—of the United States amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.