10 Movie Cliches That Need To Die
8. Token Scenes Purely For Chinese Audiences
In general, Hollywood movies tend to make way more money internationally than they do at the domestic box-office (bar a few exceptions), and Chinese moviegoers now have the power to dictate whether a movie is a success or failure.
The MCU has always benefited from a global market, and major appeal in China has seen it soar where another Disney franchise, Star Wars, has never been a hit in the country and struggled to hit the same ceiling.
With the Chinese box-office being the second biggest in the world, it's meant that Hollywood has become shamelessly transparent about courting those international moviegoers. Iron Man 3 went so far as to create a 'Chinese version' released exclusively for that market, which included four minutes of extra footage where Dr. Wu tells Tony that his country has his back on live TV.
When that didn't work as planned (it turns out Chinese audiences aren't dumb and can tell when sub-plots are crammed in to pander to them), Hollywood became a bit more subtle about including region-specific alterations in movies, and sometimes opts for a full US-China co-production like The Meg.
Representation is always good, but in a lot of cases the money-making machine behind these decisions are so transparent they're hard to ignore.