In 2014, President Xi Jinping called for a stronger national effort to boost China’s global popularity in proportion to its economic rise. “We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s message to the world,” he said. But nnless the Communist Party relaxes its censorship of domestic films, experts say Beijing’s dreams of wielding Chinese soft power globally through its film industry could stall.
The US film industry is quite successful in China — likely to become the world’s largest cinema market in coming years, according to industry insiders — even though regulators only allow a limited number of foreign films to be screened each year.
China has not enjoyed the same success in Western markets. Italian film director Gianluigi Perrone says that is because while Hollywood films often also carry a patriotic message, it is done with greater subtlety.
“The ‘soft power’ in US films has been very subliminal and subtle since the post-WW2 era,” says Perrone, who has experienced censorship in China. “The messages in Chinese films have to be so explicit that it’s too direct for Western audiences. It overcomes the entertaining part.”
Consequently, some independent filmmakers who want to create more nuanced films are bypassing the domestic market.
Even huge popularity is no longer enough to save a director or a seemingly anodyne piece of entertainment from the censor’s gaze.
If it does indeed go for a subscription model, Google has some important decisions to make about how will dish money out to publishers.
On YouTube, one of the stats that determines how much ad revenue creators get is “minutes watched”. In gaming, “minutes played” could lead to some developers introducing gameplay mechanics that are counter-intuitive to a good time, but vital if they are to gain income.
Or, developers might have to make up the loss of funds by encouraging players to pay for additional items to progress more quickly, in a far more aggressive manner than console gamers are used to today.
The ad-laden, endorphin-pumping, lootbox-peddling mobile gaming industry might be considered the canary in a very miserable coal-mine, here. Paying for a games console, and its games, may not be such a bad thing after all.
It marks the end of an era when tech companies invested heavily in vr animation content with open-ended non-monetary goals to develop the technology. Facebook, too, launched a similar initiative — Oculus Story Studio — which it shuttered in May 2017.
FLUX (or FLUX. 1) is a suite of text-to-image models from Black Forest Labs, a new company set up by some of the AI researchers behind innovations and models like VQGAN, Stable Diffusion, Latent Diffusion, and Adversarial Diffusion Distillation
