There is a whole lot more to a healthy democracy than “I voted”.

China doesn’t need to retaliate. Chinese cinema goers are overwhelmingly choosing domestic product over import in recent years. For 2024, for example, 80% of the Chinese box office went to Chinese productions.

The problem is he brought a deck of poker cards to a chess game.

The movies normalized The American Way™ as the default way of doing things. The billionaires then financed the people pitching The American Way™. Without the first, the second wouldn’t work.

The Chinese market is huge, yes, but increasingly turning away from Hollywood productions to homegrown ones. In 2025 for example 哪吒2 (Nézhā 2) broke scored over $2 billion at the box office, with a record-smashing $1.96 billion of that coming domestically. By way of comparison Captain America 4 only managed $14.4 million so far, a dramatic drop from 2016’s Captain America 3 returns of $180 million in 2016.

For reference, even CA3’s $180 million is an order of magnitude smaller than Nezha 2. CA4’s is two orders of magnitude smaller.

Now this is still true: China’s theatre-going audience, estimated at over half a billion people, is larger than the entire population of the USA. It’s still a hugely important market. But, for example, in 2024 the Chinese box office was estimated at ~6 billion dollars total: and 80% of that went to domestic films. The best-performing foreign film of 2024 (Dune 2) only made $48 million, ranking it about 8th. 7th was 维和防暴队 (Wéihé Fángbàoduì/Formed Police Unit) and it made over $120 million.

I’m pretty sure that the Chinese market for Hollywood films is vanishing.

Not even slightly surprising to me. Mention China, directly or indirectly, and the fee fees of American neocon thugs get hurt and the downvote brigade comes out to fight as only they know best to fight.

snort

The downvoting brigade is out in force I see.

Terrified, are we, about an alternative to the current broken system?

Oh, God. Freeze Peach has reached the UK.

And here you come SO FUCKING CLOSE … and still fumble the ball. Tsk. Tsk.

Removed by mod

(Hint: Check your assumptions. And while you’re at it check the thread history.)

I’m pretty sure that any murder is a death sentence.

(Hint: check your assumptions.)

Yes it is, actually.

Don’t worry. That three-month long slide down has had a couple of days of reversal here and there. That’s just the nature of rich folk casinos.

Going. Yes. Progressive aspect on the present tense. Not past tense or present tense perfected aspect.

Of course they didn’t. The Apartheid Manchild hasn’t actually invented anything worth mentioning. Today they even buy batteries from BYD for some of their models because they haven’t innovated in battery tech since back in the pre-Musk days.

Should have clipped the zip ties to make it look more authentic to the passing gaze.

A modern day police procedural, likely using either CORPS (if I want crunch) or FATE (if I want drama). Think something like Law & Order without the fascist apologia (but WITH Jerry Orbach!) expanded a bit to include peripheral characters including the criminals, the families of both sides, etc.

And then the world ends.

Well, not quite ends, but there’s a rather sudden drop in the standard of living as the half of the world facing the sun gets burned to a crisp, in effect, while the ensuing massive wave of fire and plasma scorches most of what is left. Only very small portions of the world survive (and that only barely). Nobody IC will know how or why it happened (I naturally will—it’s one of the scenarios taken from CORPS Apocalypse) but when it does, the characters will have to face living in a world where most of humanity is dead, the trappings of civilization are gone (most important of those being the supply chains that keep cities alive!) and all that’s left are the buildings and a rapidly-dwindling supply of essentials.

I tried doing this once when some players were saying they wanted a campaign that would surprise them. And surprise them it did, but apparently this was not the kind of surprise they were looking for. I want to try it again with players who will be strongly warned in advance that the campaign will go completely off the rails and change genre after a few sessions of play establishes their characters, their personalities, their relationships, etc.

Yes, I did ask for “top ten”. Yes it says “top ten” in its response. Yes, it listed eleven.