While American movies have seen decades of success worldwide, there is something about Hollywood that certain countries just don’t seem to like. To be more specific, there’s something about Hollywood that China doesn’t like. The Chinese Communist Party has a frankly embarrassing record when it comes to outlawing perfectly innocuous, and even delightfully charming classics. Just look at the time China banned “Back to the Future” for the wild reason that time travel movies in general “disrespect history.” It also took until 2006’s “Casino Royale” for James Bond to be unbanned in China, which is pretty crazy considering the character had ascended to legendary pop culture status not long after 1962’s “Dr. No” kicked off cinema’s most enduring franchise.
Banning art of any kind is pretty dodgy business if you ask me, but China isn’t the only offender on that front. If you want to talk about treating the populace as if they’re mere property of the state, the CCP is outshone in the East only by the “society” overseen by Kim Jong Un in North Korea. The latest incarnation of the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un inherited a state with a long and proud tradition of banning creative products for the kinds of nebulous reasons that emerge from these totalitarian regimes — “Offending the national spirit,” that sort of thing.
Take the time Seth Rogen almost managed to start a war with North Korea over his 2014 comedy “The Interview.” At the time, per the BBC, Kim and his cohorts dubbed the release of the film, “the most blatant act of terrorism and war” and condemned the “reckless U.S. provocative insanity” of enabling a “gangster filmmaker,” evidently prompting a “gust of hatred and rage” in the homeland. In that case, you can conceivably see how a movie that poked fun at Kim Jong Un himself might have got the dictator’s knickers in a twist. But it was not the first time North Korea had outlawed a movie for offending the country’s sensibilities. In fact, they outright banned a movie that depicted the destruction of large swathes of the US in intimate detail, proving that there really is no pleasing these despot folks.