Monster Hunter director, stars apologize after movie pulled from Chinese theaters

Monster Hunter director Paul W. S. Anderson and stars Milla Jovovich and Jin Au-Yeung (MC Jin) apologize after offensive jokes gets their movie pulled from Chinese cinemas.

Monster Hunter, Paul W. S. Anderson’s extremely loose (there are monsters and a guy with a sword) adaptation of Capcom’s hugely popular video game series, opened in China late last week…or at least that was the plan, but almost immediately after the movie dropped in theaters, it was pulled, thanks to outrage over an offensive joke. According to Variety, on Friday afternoon, a quarter of movie screenings in China were for Monster Hunter. By Saturday, that number had dropped to 0.7 percent; that’s how fast it happened.

So what was the offensive joke? Brace yourselves. At one point, a Chinese character played by Jin Au-Yeung (better known as MC Jin, the first Asian-American solo rapper to sign to a major label) turns to a white characters and says, “Look at my knees! What kind of knees are these? Chi-knees!”

Now, as a white American with basically no knowledge of Chinese culture, that line didn’t strike me as offensive. It strikes me as stupid and not very funny — like, I wonder if Anderson wrote it to sound dumb, because it sounds dumb — but it’s not the kind of thing I figured would get a movie pulled from theaters overnight.

But in China, it was a very different story. Per Variety, there are a couple of layers to what people found offensive. To start, folk were taking it as a reference to a racist schoolyard rhyme that insults Asians. (“Chi-nese, Jap-a-nese, dir-ty knees, look at these.”) Then, the localizers in charge of writing Chinese subtitles for the film made the dialogue a reference to a Chinese saying about how men must have dignity and not kneel down easily. Roughly translated, the saying is, “Men have gold under their knees, and only kneel to the heavens and their mother.”

Also, the translated line does not mention the word “Chinese,” which people have taken as an attempt to cover up what was intended as an insult to China. The blowback on Chinese social media was swift and furious, with prominent entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party even getting in on the action and posting some pretty inflammatory references to George Floyd, who died after a police officer pressed his knee on his neck.

So a lot of ire was directed at the Western studios that produced Monster Hunter. But a lot was reserved for Chinese mega company Tencent, which co-produced the movie.

Jin Au-Yeung has released a statement about the incident on his Instagram, saying it’s “eating at my heart.”

Monster Hunter star Milla Jovovich commented on the video. “It was our fault for not doing our due diligence and finding the WW2 era rhyme that’s caused this uproar,” she wrote.

Anderson has made a statement as well, per Deadline:

"I am absolutely devastated that a line from our movie, Monster Hunter, has offended some audience members in China. I apologize for any anxiety or upset that this line and its interpretation caused. Monster Hunter was made as fun entertainment and I am mortified that anything within it has caused unintentional offense. We have respectfully removed the line from the movie. It was never our intention to send a message of discrimination or disrespect to anyone. To the contrary — at its heart our movie is about unity."

Capcom has also released a statement distancing itself from the movie, reminding people that it had nothing to do with its production, although that hasn’t stopped people from review-bombing Monster Hunter games on Steam.

The Chinese film market is very valuable to filmmakers around the globe, but incidents like this highlight how interested parties will have to be very careful if they want to find success there.

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h/t The A.V. Club