China’s Biggest Movie Stars Get a Pay Cut (From the Government)

HONG KONG — Movie stars in China can make as much as or more than their Hollywood counterparts. The Chinese government is not happy about that.

So officials moved this week to cap how much A-listers can make, citing potential damage to a fast-growing movie industry.

Movie star pay may seem like an issue for producers and trade magazines rather than for the Chinese Communist Party. But the government hopes to nurture the industry into an economic and cultural force to rival the soft power that Hollywood has long enjoyed around the world. Extravagant paychecks and waste could hinder that effort.

China’s movie industry has blossomed in recent years, as economic growth and a rising middle class have put more people in theater seats. Ticket sales in China totaled about $8 billion last year, Chinese media reported, compared with $11 billion for the North American market. The Chinese box office even exceeded North America’s in the first few months of this year, according to one report.

With those numbers have come some Hollywood-style paychecks — many of them going to actors who are not well-known outside China. Chinese actress Fan Binbing, for example, earned $17 million in 2016, according to a Forbes magazine ranking of the world’s best-paid actresses — more than familiar Hollywood faces like Charlize Theron and Julia Roberts. (She did not appear on the 2017 list.)

Fan, 36, has had largely superfluous parts in “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and a version of “Iron Man 3” meant for audiences outside the United States, as Hollywood finds supporting roles for Chinese actors in hopes of selling more tickets in a hot new market. She is set to appear in the all-female espionage thriller “355,” which also stars Jessica Chastain and Lupita Nyong’o.

In China, however, Fan is one of the country’s most familiar faces. She shot to fame after appearing in the popular imperial palace drama “My Fair Princess” in the late 1990s. She has appeared in numerous films, such as “Chongqing Blues,” which competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. One woman has even had plastic surgery to look like Fan, according to local news outlets.

Fan drew less welcome headlines in May, when a popular television presenter accused her of trying to dodge taxes. As evidence, the presenter, Cui Yongyuan, posted on social media what he said were two versions of a contract for the same film. According to one, she was paid about $1.6 million for four days’ work; in the other, she was paid an extra $7.8 million.

It is not clear whether the contracts are real, and Fan accused Cui of slandering her. But soon after Cui made his accusations, Chinese tax authorities began investigating whether the movie industry was giving big-time actors two contracts, a public one to be reported to tax authorities and a covert one promising a large bonus. In China, the practice has come to be known as “yin and yang contracts.”

In an announcement Wednesday, Chinese tax authorities said such practices made China’s film industry too focused on money. It said that leading actors would not be permitted to earn more than 70 percent of the full cast, or to be paid more than 40 percent of production costs. Fan was not mentioned.

The announcement also criticized the film industry as “distorting social values” and “fostering money worship tendencies” among young people who are “blindly chasing celebrities.”

The Chinese government has long been both cheerleader and disciplinarian when it comes to the movie business. It restricts how many foreign-made movies can be shown in China, in part to leave room for domestic productions. But it also limits the kinds of stories that directors, writers and actors can tell — for example, forbidding themes like spirituality, or showing crime in anything other than a negative light. Increasingly, Hollywood filmmakers have bowed to Chinese box-office pressures and removed material that could offend officials.

While the Chinese market has grown, Chinese movies still trail far behind Hollywood in terms of global viewership. “Wolf Warrior 2,” a Rambo-style film about Chinese action heroes, was one of the biggest movies in the world last year, according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks ticket sales. But it still trailed U.S. blockbusters like “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and the latest installments of “The Fast and the Furious” and the “Spider-Man” franchises, among others.