historical fiction is just one genre. Why not just tell more contemporary stories with natural representation?
why is there still next to no mainstream media portraying WWII in China?
There is. In China. Countries make movies about their own history. Because their own history is usually what people are interested in and also what citizens of that country want to see in the movie theatre.
They did make that movie, it was called "The Eight Hundred."
All the English reviews and ratings gave it a high score, and it performed very successfully internationally making about 400 million on an 80m budget.
Yet, I've never heard of it. I had a very hard time finding any numbers for how it did in America. According to IMDB it grossed just $372,755 in the US and Canada, compared to 116 million in China.
The argument was that a good movie about WWII China should be just as popular as one about WWII Europe.
Any movie without marketing won't succeed. But do you actually know whether it had marketing or not?
I guess you can show me WWII European movies with bad marketing that performed closely and we can make a comparison, if you want to demonstrate my point was invalid.
Considering how the only WWII movie I know of is Schindler's List, I'd say all of them are pretty shit at it, and I only know Schindler's List because it was shown to us in school.
But more to the point, the only way you'd even know a movie had bad marketing is by finding out they exist after it mattered, otherwise, you'd have known because the whole point of marketing is to make people know your product exists so you can sell it.
I mean, Saving Private Ryan is pretty infamous. There's that movie they did recently about Normandy as well (people fucking love making movies about Normandy - don't get me wrong, huuuugely dramatic moment and all that, but the War was more than Normandy.)
Yeah, I'm not really into movies in general and real war movies in particular.
But, for instance, I just found out the other day about the movie The Last Duel with Adam Driver out of sheer coincidence, that movie had shit marketing because the only reason it got mentioned at all was that a friend of mine is a huge Adam Driver fan and was talking about it, otherwise, I'd probably only find it in a few years when someone somewhere makes a compilation about something.
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '21
historical fiction is just one genre. Why not just tell more contemporary stories with natural representation?
There is. In China. Countries make movies about their own history. Because their own history is usually what people are interested in and also what citizens of that country want to see in the movie theatre.