Will Lulu Wang’s The Farewell fare well in the Chi­nese market?

Lulu Wang’s break­out fea­ture The Farewell brought a slice of Chi­na to West­ern cine­plex­es, expos­ing and grad­u­al­ly bridg­ing the gap between an aver­age Amer­i­can girl and the cul­ture she knows is a part of her, but from which she can’t help feel estranged. As Bil­li, Awk­wa­fi­na embod­ies the inner con­flict of a first-gen­er­a­tion Amer­i­can to estab­lish a sense of inde­pen­dent self while doing right by the immi­grant par­ents pro­tec­tive of the her­itage you share.

One might assume that this would play like gang­busters in Chi­na – the sec­ond half of the inter-cul­tur­al equa­tion – but a sto­ry in Dead­line today sug­gests oth­er­wise. The Farewell has report­ed­ly been pulled from the release sched­ule by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, though the sto­ry runs a bit deep­er than that.

The item spec­u­lates that the abrupt post­pone­ment, a reg­u­lar occur­rence at a time when Chi­nese cen­sors have got­ten rather trig­ger-hap­py with all but the most par­ty-line-friend­ly pro­gram­ming, will only push The Farewell slight­ly into the future. The real ques­tion, how­ev­er, is how the film will be received once it makes the jump to theaters.

Con­sid­er the curi­ous case of Crazy Rich Asians, a box-office behe­moth in the states and with a glob­al gross to sug­gest ​“world­wide sen­sa­tion” sta­tus. Hol­ly­wood is just itch­ing to extract mon­ey from the swollen Chi­nese mar­ket, and this seemed like a slam dunk, but the film raked in a tru­ly pathet­ic $1.2 mil­lion in its open­ing weekend.

While audi­ences in Asia have eager­ly eat­en up Amer­i­can exports of the CGI extrav­a­gan­za vari­ety, with the assort­ed Mar­vel out­put and its pre-viz ilk prac­ti­cal­ly print­ing mon­ey across the Pacif­ic, West­ern films with all-Asian casts, steeped in Asian-cul­ture, aren’t always a finan­cial­ly win­ning propo­si­tion. Wang’s made a won­der­ful film, to be cer­tain, but the sense of rev­e­la­to­ry nov­el­ty that made it a phe­nom­e­non in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world doesn’t apply to China.

As the film indus­try grows increas­ing­ly glob­al­ized, indi­vid­ual releas­es must now shoul­der a greater expec­ta­tion to trans­late across the same bar­ri­er that Bil­li attempts to sur­mount in her per­son­al jour­ney. But Wang’s film now faces a predica­ment rem­i­nis­cent of that faced by Chi­nese-Amer­i­can chefs look­ing to gain a foothold in the home­land – it’s hard to sell what the pub­lic sees as an Amer­i­can ver­sion of some­thing they can already get at home.