Paul WS Anderson’s Monster Hunter sparks racism… | Little White Lies

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Paul WS Anderson’s Mon­ster Hunter sparks racism con­tro­ver­sy in China

09 Dec 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

A woman wearing a dark outfit and wielding a large weapon in a post-apocalyptic setting.
A woman wearing a dark outfit and wielding a large weapon in a post-apocalyptic setting.
The direc­tor has apol­o­gised, but his film remains vir­tu­al­ly banned in the country’s major market.

It would appear that Paul WS Ander­son, direc­tor of the new effects spec­ta­cle Mon­ster Hunter, has become the mon­ster hunt­ed. His hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed sci-fi epic will come to the­aters in the US on Christ­mas day, but it’s already got­ten a release in the expect­ed mon­ey­mak­er mar­ket of Chi­na, where the release has been scut­tled by an unsa­vory controversy.

As Vari­ety reports, Mon­ster Hunter has been pulled from Chi­nese cin­e­mas fol­low­ing its pre­mière on the 4th of Decem­ber, due to a brief exchange of dia­logue that caused an out­cry for evok­ing a racist nurs­ery rhyme. Though the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Con­stan­tin Film and Ander­son and star Jin Au-Yeung have apol­o­gized, their film’s future in Asia now looks unclear.

A scene in which a Chi­nese sol­dier jokes to his Aus­tralian part­ner, What kinds of knees are these? chi-knees!” elicit­ed a strong push­back for its seem­ing allu­sion to the WWII-era school­yard taunt of Chi­nese, Japan­ese, dirty knees.” These lines have been delet­ed from the edit for the ver­sions that will go to oth­er glob­al ter­ri­to­ries, but in Chi­na, the dam­age has already been done.

It took only a day for some Chi­nese movie hous­es to pull their screen­ings, and film info and tick­et­ing sites have erased all trace of Mon­ster Hunter’s exis­tence. The rejec­tion has been so swift and severe that the Hainan Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val can­celed and refund­ed tick­ets for the film Fishlove, just because the char­ac­ters of its Chi­nese title were deemed too sim­i­lar to those of Mon­ster Hunter.

This pos­es a crush­ing blow to the for­tunes of Anderson’s lat­est, reliant as it was on the Chi­nese tick­et sales to square its $60 mil­lion bud­get. His last film, 2017’s Res­i­dent Evil: The Final Chap­ter, made most of its mon­ey in Chi­na, its $160 mil­lion take over six times of that earned in the States. Whether acci­den­tal or not, Mon­ster Hunter’s fol­ly could very well cost it everything.

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