In the summer of 2010, Hollywood studio MGM had the film "Red Dawn" in the bag and ready for release. There was one little problem, though: The movie — a remake of the 1984 film of the same name, a Cold War paranoid-fantasy about a Soviet invasion of America — had rebooted itself by imagining a more contemporary adversary: China.
A leaked copy of the script had led to an outraged editorial in a Chinese Communist Party-controlled newspaper, and the last thing MGM wanted as it struggled out of bankruptcy was to be shut out of the fastest-growing box office in the world, access to which was strictly controlled by the CCP. So MGM spent an extra $1 million on post-production to digitally erase all Chinese flags and military emblems, and change them to those of a new adversary: North Korea.
And why not? At the time, China was the fifth-largest movie market in the world and growing quickly (it's now No. 2), whereas North Korea was not even on the movie map. China had shown its ability to mess with Hollywood studios over content they disapproved of — such as "Kundun," "Red Corner" and "Seven Years In Tibet" — while North Korea could do little more than have its puppet newscasters squeal in outrage like trapped weasels. Hell, "Team America: World Police" got away with impaling Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il in 2004, before revealing that he was an alien cockroach.
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