Here comes Chinese FDI in a very public way

This NYT story today really jumped out at me, and the Chinese just bought, in a signature Foreign Direct Investment move, the second-biggest movie chain in the US:  

The Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate with extensive interests in the entertainment business, has agreed to acquire AMC Entertainment, North America’s second-largest movie theater owner, in a deal that is valued at $2.6 billion, including roughly $2 billion in assumed debt, the companies said Sunday.

Enlarge This Image

David Gray/Reuters

Gerardo I. Lopez, AMC’s chief executive, left, exchanged documents with Zhang Lin, vice president of the Wanda Group, during a ceremony in Beijing on Monday.

The acquisition creates the world’s largest theater group, the companies said. It also represents a significant expansion of Chinese influence in the American film industry. The industry has been looking to China for a vast new reservoir of ticket buyers for Hollywood movies, while joining Chinese investors to produce films like the planned “Iron Man 3” and teaming up to build studio facilities and a new Disney theme park in China.

The usual motives apply:  Chinese firm looking for know-how in an industry that's booming across China but isn't being as monetized as it could be - by Western standards.  For the US company, a crucial sub-plot emerges a few paras down the story:

In addition to the $2.6 billion value assigned to AMC’s debt and equity in the deal, Wanda is expected to invest $500 million for what the companies called “strategic and operating initiatives.” Mr. Wang said that the money would generally be used for renovation and other needs, but that specifics were up to Mr. Lopez and his team. Mr. Lopez said there was no plan in place for the money. But, he said, it might be used to retire debt, acquire new theaters or fix up old ones.

To me, this is a very positive development, and it's one we're going to read about countless times over the next decade. And yes, it will look and feel like Japanese money "buying up everything!" across America in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

But, of course, America has "suffered" these invading waves of FDI throughout our long history as a multinational economic union.  Chinese money will be just as good and useful as those of the other countries that preceeded it, and the further intertwinning of our economies will mitigate the craziness out of the Beltway crowd as they pine for a "near peer" competitor to justify the dropping floor of the defense budget.

You know, the Chinese were going to be the featured villain in the remake of "Red Dawn," but then Hollywood realized they'd be shutting themselves out of the Chinese box office, so they subbed in the North Koreans, which - of course - makes the film a complete and utter fantasy.  But it just goes to show you what all this financial connectivity leads too - cooler heads prevailing everywhere save among those fiercely dedicated fear-mongers in DC.

Hollywood gets itself some Chinese

Old Jack Welch bit: you can't succeed in global economy without succeeding in China.

My addendum: you can't succeed in China unless you're Chinese.

Solution: Get yourself some Chinese.

Hollywood has seen overseas B.O. rise from a tiny share to well over half in recent years. More specifically, while the US market is flat, burgeoning middle class China's is booming.

WSJ sees two different markets, but I already see a Chinese market that, with incredible restrictions on the number of US imports, is already half-synched to our blockbuster mode.

You know about Spielberg already turning toward China for future financing.  This piece talks about Disney doing the same.  Co-productions will become the norm, connecting talent with bucks (literally).  Yes, nothing will change the flops-v-tentpoles ratio. Indeed, it is likely to rise in the short-run, but Hollywood is very adept at figuring these things out, much like Japan does in its very clever global marketing of anime.

In the meantime, we be treated to the glorious hysterics of the "Red Dawn" remake. [The Chinese dodged a movie bullet there, as the original script had them invading, but now we get the fantastically implausible depiction of North Korea doing the same - much like a recent (pretty good) video game "Homefront."  The kicker: MGM rebooted the script so as to not lose out on the growing Chinese box office.] But, over time, this will be a good collaboration and a bilateral image reshaper that benefits the planet.

Chart of the day: Cinema B.O. reflects globalization of mass media

Per my many past posts on the subject, a great chart showing how flat domestic US box office is (hovering around $10B mark), while DVD sales have come and gone and Blu-Rays aren't filling the gap as Internet- and cable-delivered (virtually indistinguishable when it comes to the home) take over with their much-thinner margins (none of that being shown on this Economist chart).

Thus, why it's so crucial to Hollywood that foreign B.O. has more than doubled in last decade, and shows all signs of taking off even more.

Why?  As with most things, it's the emergence of the global middle class.  Think to when movies took off in America (1920s) and then realize how sustaining they were even during the Great Depression (escapism), thus all bottom-of-the-pyramid logic plays here too.

Amidst the ugly piracy and the just plain bad censorship, there is the sheer good of numbers

FT full-page "analysis" and Economist story.

FT is about rise of microblog sites in China and how the government throws ever more censors at the problem. As always, it's a strange mix of shaping and monitoring public opinion on the government's part, but what always impresses me is the sheer amount of expression going on.

Naturally, the piece leads with the latest example of a netizen mob gone wild over some official's nastiness -- or more specifically, some high official's son's nastiness (the infamous son of Li Gang, who, after hitting a student with his car while drunk, drove off shouting from his car window, "Make a report if you dare, my dad is Li Gang!").  Well, the report was made and Li Gang paid the price.  "My dad is Li Gang" became the Chinese web equivalent of "I'm Spactacus!" symbolizing everything that the public finds wrong about official abuse. 

But as the piece makes clear, the evolution of China's web defies traditional Western expectations.  More and more Chinese log on, and more and more government effort is launched to keep track of it all.  Instead of some glorious montage scene where everybody expresses their clear desire for free elections and then we cut to the movie's uplifting climax, we see a lot of virulent nationalism being expressed.  And instead of hapless government censors throwing up their hands at the insane flow of words, the Party is getting fairly sophisticated at managing the whole mess, even publishing its annual list of Li-Gang-like events.  So, for now, the web just seems like another place where the Party is subtly polling the public, cracking down only in the those rare instances where somebody truly steps out of line.  

We in the West are disappointed with this, but I don't think we should be.  Expecting China to morph into the U.S. overnight is wrong, but so is assuming that the line between Party control and public expression isn't moving, because it is.  It's just that the public is happy enough, for now, exploring a lot of personal and mundane, simply entertaining stuff, not being all that different from anybody else in the West.

And when the political is expressed, it's often frighteningly out of control and over the top -- immature.  That too is not all that different from the West, if you go back to an equivalent time in our political evolution.

And that's the trick.  Rapid modernization can speed up all sorts of evolutions, but a rapid modernization of the political system is something entirely different.  Those sorts of rules, when they change abruptly, can be very destabilizing, and the more you let the connectivity revolutionize everything else in the economy and society, the more you, the leadership and even the public, should fear commensurate possibilities of change in the political sphere. 

We can assume that everything would work out to our liking if the Party just let it all hang out at once, but we'd likely be wrong.  People need time to get used to all that change, and we consistently underestimate the amount of time traveling that the average 50-something Chinese has undergone over the past three decades. We took a couple centuries to travel similar political ground, and we forget the journey, so we say, "All right already, you've had the web now for a while, so why doesn't everything resemble our way of life?"

I say, be patient and give them time to get used to the all the economic and social change before moving on to the political.  And then expect that journey to likewise be entirely Chinese, understanding that how they kept things together over time has never been our way, because our way was to escape all that back home, run here, and build something entirely different. 

Over time, the Party commands less and less of the public's attention, and for this thing to evolve in a more free direction, that's all we need. 

The Economist story makes this point.  Not only is the government's main channel, CCTV, losing viewers to less controlled provincial stations, it's really losing the young to Internet video, most of which is pirated immediately from the West.  Interesting example of a show I know and love: "Prison Break" is huge in China and its star, Wentworth Miller is not only mobbed everywhere he goes in China, he's the frickin' face of GM on TV commercials!

The show has never been aired on any Chinese TV network.

Now, the temptation is to read meaning into Wentworth's original TV subject matter, but go easy on that.  Point is, the young get used to choosing on their own and, over time, that changes things.

So, go easy on the pessimism, I say.  We expect too much out of the original, time-traveling generations here.  Xi Jinping (China's next president and in his late 50s), for example, still remembers vividly being thrown in jail as a kid as a political prisoner on his dad's behalf during the Cultural Revolution.  He's China's leader for the next decade, and his "Sixties' were a bit different from the Boomers.  

Conservatives in the West keep saying, Nixon went to China 40 years ago and look how the Party still rules! They say that because that's all they want to see.  But we need to go back and read our history here.  The Cultural Revolution was a "long national nightmare" that trumps our Vietnam and Watergate by . . .  more than just a bit.  It was a national insanity and the bite it took out of the national psyche was closer to our Civil War than anything we've experienced since

So rather than expecting that much more time traveling by the 50-something crowd, think of this more in terms of post-Cultural Revolution generations.  The first truly post-CR leadership generation comes online in 2022 and China hits the half-century-mark post Deng's reforms another decade after that.  Realistically, this is always where I've been positing this sort of political change -- when the bulk of China's population has had all its formative experiences post the Cultural Revolution, or when their definition of normal truly normalizes, and their willingness to start some of the political time-traveling builds to the point of acting on those impulses. 

For now and for a while, China's population will remain mostly filled up by people for whom all the change to date is more than enough for them.  We can be disappointed in that most human of realities, or we can just be happy for them and all the changes they've been able to enjoy in their collective lives to date.

What does mass blogging in China tell us?

image here

Thomas Friedman column on blogging in China becoming the true voice of the people at 70 million strong.

Positive or negative trend?  Because you're talking relatively successful people in a fast rising country, the overall voice is going to be one of nationalistic pride--even hubris, leading Friedman to hypothesize that aggressive bloggers are already becoming yet another source of populism that Beijing is both scared and mindful of in its decision-making.

Already, notes Freidman, the US ambassador is hosting big-time bloggers in an effort to get out America's message to the people with less official filtering.

Key point and a cool bit from Friedman:

“China for the first time has a public sphere to discuss everything affecting Chinese citizens,” explained Hu Yong, a blogosphere expert at Peking University. “Under traditional media, only elite people had a voice, but the Internet changed that.” He added, “We now have a transnational media. It is the whole society talking, so people from various regions of China can discuss now when something happens in a remote village — and the news spreads everywhere.” But this Internet world “is more populist and nationalistic,” he continued. “Many years of education that our enemies are trying to keep us down has produced a whole generation of young people whose thinking is like this, and they now have a whole Internet to express it.”

Watch this space. The days when Nixon and Mao could manage this relationship in secret are long gone. There are a lot of unstable chemicals at work out here today, and so many more players with the power to inflame or calm U.S.-China relations. Or to paraphrase Princess Diana, there are three of us in this marriage.

I see an advantage for us in all of these developments: our system is much more comfortable processing such popular pressures than China's is--and a lot more experienced to boot.

A lot of strategists on our side salivate at the notion that China will be forced into military confrontations with the West by all this rising nationalistic spirit, but the truth is just the opposite: fear of enraging the population by accepting any form of defeat keeps the Chinese leadership very keen to avoid any scuffle with the U.S. that it cannot control.

Why Hollywood loves sequels

Variety story on summer box office 2010, up nearly a billion from just a decade earlier.

But what caught my eye was that divot in 2005.  It made me wonder, what caused that?  Not an economic downturn or some military calamity, and the summer itself was pretty normal.

Then I found a follow-on set of slides that seemed to explain it:  only one fewer major release that summer (36 vice 37), but a huge drop in sequels with their guaranteed audiences (from 15 sequels in 2003 to 9 in 2004 to a mere 3 in 2005.

And that's why Hollywood needs sequels.  In terms of BO, they attract the summer baseload demand.  Track that V from 2003 through 2007 and you see that the reduced flow of sequels certainly seems to have caused it.  Would seem to indicate that, if Hollywood had its druthers, it would always tee up 9-10 sequels every summer.

The sheer discovery that is simply analyzing all this new connectivity

Cool Economist piece on the social web in its Technology Quarterly, but it's really about business intelligence, a field that is skyrocketing in its ability to monitor, analyze and create new marketing strategies from the wealth of info that is naturally captured by online behavior.  Similar thing is coming down the pike in the healthcare industry with the advent of electronic medical records--huge bonanza.

In the first instance, a lot of biz intell used to simply keep existing customers by making them happier.  The most sophisticated stuff will be used to sniff our fraud and criminal behavior.

A classic example of an old concept of mine--actually the heart and soul of the "new map":  with connectivity comes circumscribed behavior because each connection reveals you to others, but in return you are offered fabulous access and efficiencies and the more tailored meeting of your desires.  It is a transaction: the more you reveal, the more respondents can predict your needs and wants and behaviors--both good and bad.

And the mapping technology (like my wonderful Google maps on my Motorola Droid) only kicks that process into high gear.

An amazing amount of new rules to work out on all of this--a fascinating process to witness in coming years.

Rapid connectivity creates more suspicions than understanding

Old strawman given another good beating:  connectivity doesn't instantly heal all wounds!

Economist story on how social media doesn't change people over night by exposing them to different people and creating instant wisdom.

(sigh!)

It turns out, research shows, that "people are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges."

I'm actually more pessimistic than that:  I believe that rapid connectivity gains generally create more unrest than peace at first.   That's why I called it the "Pentagon's new map."

Piece concludes that the Internet is just a tool, and as such, does nothing on its own.

My take:  sheer connectivity on its own does not trump real-world experience or generational weight, so expect the change to be gradual versus instant.  The Millennials will not be the Boomers, but they will not replace them overnight thanks to social media, and each country's version of the first-all-digital-generation will make its influence and thinking felt on a different timescale.

In other words, even in this connected age, change typically arrives no faster than we can handle it, because if it comes too fast, we simply ignore it and render its impact meaningless.

The internet as trade pact

Great line from Economist "Leaders" bit on the web's "new walls":

 The internet is as much a trade pact as an invention.

Actually, until it became a trade pact, it was an interesting bit of technology and not much else--a fantasy of a back-up comms net once the bombs started dropping ("Can you read this?  Oh my God!  At least the two of us survived!  Now what?").

So the web really only works when people see commercial value, and when that commerce rears its beautiful head, barriers naturally arise.  Governments want to fence off its value proposition for national firms (far more than they care to keep out "bad" content).  Companies want to create "walled gardens" for their proprietary offerings.  Some net providers want sites to pay for premier promotion.

These are all unremarkable developments.  The web is certainly a generation or two beyond the telephone, but why it was supposed to be some everything-is-free nirvana is beyond me, any more than phones were going to change everything before and the telegraph before that.

These are the three types of walls cited by the Economist: national, company, and the possible downfall of the net-neutrality vision.  So Wired says the net is dead--that goes too far says The Economist.

It has been my proposition going back to the mid-1990s, that everybody wants the connectivity, but everyone also wants to control the content--to their tastes, to their fears, and--most definitely--to their advantage.

The fencing off of the web is not all that different from the fencing off of the American West.  If you want something to be truly tended, and not suffer the fate of the commons, people will need to own it and care about it.

But the free trade point made by the mag is equally valid; it just won't be the commons we imagined it to be.

And so it will need to go through the same negotiations--bilateral, multilateral, global, that regular trade goes through.

I'm not worried about the web.  I see this as a natural evolution.

Netflix as a brick thrown through Hollywood's window

Netflix's real plan is to ditch the mailing biz and go full-fore on internet streaming.  The blu-ray in our home theater is connected up via the Web to YouTube, Netflix, etc., and when we first got it, we held a subscription for a while.  But three things turned us off: with all the portable DVD players and other options for using discs (like in the van), we still like to have a physical item that can be used over and over again in a variety of locations.  Second, the streaming quality is only so-so, and even the alleged hi-def struck us as un-special compared to cable and blu-ray discs. Third, Netflix only has so many films.

Well, the technology will always get better, but the key for Netflix is to get access to much larger libraries, which apparently it is doing now with its war chest, cutting all sorts of deals with major studios "in a way that makes Netflix akin to a cable or satellite operator."

So when you see that chart below that shows the web will be most about video, this is a big reason why.

What would interest me:  Netflix delivering movies in my home theater the day they come out in theaters. 

Because once that happens, I never go to a movie theater again.

Chart of the Day (3): Internet video will be king

Economist piece on the web's evolution.

When the web was mostly text, you could understand that "information must be free" thing.

But as the web becomes mostly video (my kids watch as much on the web as on the TV, and watch much TV on the web), you can understand companies' desire to charge for content.

The middle class loves movies--3D or not!

image here

Trio of FT stories.

First one laments future of 3D in Hollywood after recent string of flops that prove only that bad films, when presented in 3D, still suck!  Avatar?  Alice?  Great flicks.  But the rest of the recent crop?  Complete crap--unsave-able by 3D, big surprise.

With roughly 2/3rds of Hollywood's take now from foreign markets, you wonder about the need to push 3D so extensively, especially given the theater costs involved and the higher ticket prices. Neither go well with an emerging global middle class, which is easier to please than that and doesn't necessarily want to shell out more money for fewer viewings.

Second story cites rising impact of India's middle class on theater-going there, as luxury cinemas (basically, a version of the modern US cinema but a big improvement over standard national fare) are going up all over India's big cities.  And even with Bollywood's immense draw there, the article says that the full force of the market is far from being felt to date.  Some chains are reporting 80% growth in attendance over the last year, as more people with more disposable income are flocking to films both native and foreign (Inception, for example, is doing very well in India).

Still, the numbers can only go up.  A blockbuster in the US will get 70m viewers out of a total population of 300m.  In India, a blockbuster gets maybe 50m out of 1.2B.  And we're talking an Indian demo that's half under 25 (or 600m in youth alone!).

Already, according to the third cite, we see Universal planning a big movie-theme park in Mumbai, one that would blend the best of Bolly and Holly.

A trend to watch.

Policing the web: brain burnout for the cops

Interesting NYT story on the mental health toll suffered by people who work for screening companies and monitor the web for depraved content.

Reminds me of that old University of Wisconsin study that my brother participated in when he was a student:  shown loads of graphic and nasty stuff over a lengthy period, he increasingly expressed more ambivalence about it—the toll deadening his normal sense of revulsion.

That profound desensitizing exacts its pound of mental flesh.  In one company, 50 workers review 20m photos a week!  The effect is compared to battle fatigue.

Desilu = 20th century, Desi Hits! = 21st

Anjula Acharia-Bath, CEO of Desi Hits!

WSJ story on new record label focused on promoting Indian music.

Jai Ho!

Actually, my favorite recent Indian piece was that long soaring one that fronted Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”

Legendary Jimmy Iovine supports Desi Hits!, which started in 2007 and is now coming under the larger umbrella of Universal.

The label is expected to blend Indian music with hip hop—naturally.

Online advertising in China takes off

Okay, make that a triple Sunday dip on Chart of the Day.

WSJ chart showing the skyrocketing growth in online advertising spending in China:  nowhere in 2000 and closing in on $3b this year. China’s total ad market is just above $20B and growing at a 14% clip. Online growing a bit faster at 25%.

Result? 

The world’s largest advertising companies want to conquer a presence in a burgeoning territory:  online-ad buying in China.

How video games may save orchestral music

More on my continuing theme of the elevation of video games to an art from that challenges traditional Hollywood product when it comes to the allegiance of my kids.

When we travel in the car nowadays and the kids plug in their iPods, I find them shuffling more and more musical scores (far more classical than you’d expect) from favorite videogames.

Rob Garner really, really wants a set of timpani.

Garner doesn’t play the drums himself. He’s a graduate student at the University of Maryland, getting a degree in library science, and his instrument is the trumpet.  But Garner is also president of the GSO, a student-run 100-member orchestra that’s been performing several times a year since 2005.

GSO, by the way, stands for Gamer Symphony Orchestra. This group is devoted exclusively to the music of video games.  And timpani could really come in handy when performing some of the themes from the popular game Halo.

These days, a lot of people in the classical music world are worried that kids aren’t connecting with orchestral music. But the music of video games is emerging as one way orchestras may actually be reaching new audiences. It’s certainly proliferating.

Hmmm, and I was so ready to harrumph about kids today!

MC Pushkin lives!

Neat WSJ weekend piece on the “surprise” that is Russian rap!

Anybody who’s traveled this world in the last decade can attest to how pervasively rap/hip hop have spread, with even greater impact, I would argue, than rock ‘n roll in decades previous.

Rock was more about cutting loose, but rap and hip hop tend to have a more critical tone regarding the powers that be, and since the main purveyors tend to come from underprivileged urban youth, that’s a more potent signaling function in this day of superempowered individuals pissed off enough to turn to terror.  Not to insinuate a link—anything but, just a powerful association (both terror and jihadism tap into a lot of the same anger and pool of individuals).  

But my sense has always been that rap and hip hop are more of a venting than a mobilization—by far.  Also more of a stirring for progressive political action, so by and large a very positive impact and, in many ways, a counterbalancing medium.

From the story:

To the surprise of many, Russian rap has emerged as an outlet for social protest, with rappers producing songs on such hot-button issues as drugs, police brutality and the immense power of the Kremlin-backed elite.  Although most mainstream, TV-friendly rappers stick to familiar topics, like bling and babes, the Internet has fueled the growth of a vibrant rap underground with socially  conscious songs too provocative for the state-dominated media.

Not all that unfamiliar, yes?  And hardly that much of a surprise for a Russian society that has loved its dissident poets over the centuries, going all the way to Pushkin.

GameStop, our favorite stop for games, gets come competition

Bloomberg Businessweek blurb on how GameStop, the fast-growing retail chain that sells entertainment software (games of all sorts—new and used and traded in), will have new challengers in the field as Best Buy seeks a beachhead in the trade-in trade and game makers look for more digital deliver a la Xbox.

Why this interests me:  my kids are incredibly loyal customers of GameStop, as are my wife and I.  Why?  No matter what gear or games we buy, they will take it back in trade for store credit, plus the sales people are incredibly knowledgeable on the games themselves, making them a seriously helpful resource.  In short, they treat us all very nicely every time we walk through the door, and I’m guessing that Best Buy, with its big box mentality (in contrast, GameStop stores are akin to neighborhood video stores in the late 80s and early 90s), will have a very hard time making the same level of personalized service work. 

Hell, at our preferred GameStop, everybody knows our names, and goes out of their way to make sure we’re happy as all get out before we leave (as well as signed up for all desired new-release dates).  Service-wise, the place is just as sharp in customer service as the fabulous Mandarin Oriental hotel in DC.  It’s that good.

So I’m pulling for GameStop, even as I knew this day would come.

My only complaint with GameStop:  they used to do trade-ins on DVDs too.

Personal data as a sellable asset

Our Bynamite heroesNYT story that I've been waiting a while to read:

On the Internet, users supply the raw material that helps generate billions of dollars a year in online advertising revenue. Search requests, individual profiles on social networks, Web browsing habits, posted pictures and many Internet messages are all mined to serve up targeted online ads.

All of this personal information turns out to be extremely valuable, collectively. So why should Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other ad businesses get all the rewards?

That is the question that animates Bynamite, a start-up company based in San Francisco. “There should be an economic opportunity on the consumer side,” said Ginsu Yoon, a co-founder of the company. “Nearly all the investment and technology is on the advertising side.”

Bynamite, to be sure, is another entry in the emerging market for online privacy products. The business interest in such products, of course, is being fed by worries about how much personal information marketers collect. Also playing a part are recent outcries after Facebook changed its privacy practices and Google introduced a social networking tool, Buzz, that initially shared information widely without users’ permission. Venture capital has been pouring into Web-based monitoring and privacy protection products like ReputationDefender and Abine, as well as services that help parents protect children’s privacy online, like SafetyWeb and SocialShield.

Bynamite brings a somewhat different perspective to the privacy market. “Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

Both the protection and the value approaches to the privacy market could well pay off, says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm. “What’s intriguing about Bynamite,” he said, “is its emphasis on privacy as revolving around choice and ownership of data, and ultimately a notion of an exchange of value.” (Kleiner Perkins is an investor in ReputationDefender but not in Bynamite.)

I think this is a great step forward toward an inevitable future. In my mind, the Googles of the world are largely ripping us off and achieving way too much power.  The backlash will come, but this is the right way to channel it.

Disney's penetration of Asia goes way beyond theme parks

pic here

FT front-pager on Disney expanding its language schools in China, with a goal of almost 150 schools and $100m in revenue. By 2015, it wants to be training 150k Chinese kids each year.

The curriculum features Disney characters, obviously.  A growing Chinese middle class "means there is no shortage of parents willing to pay $2,200 a year for tuition of two hours a week." 

I heard that last bit in spades from the Gymboree international franchise operators: there is almost no limit to what parents will pay in emerging markets to get their kids ahead of the pack--typical of countries on the rise.

The hidden benefit is also fairly obvious, as far as Disney is concerned:

But the schools also enable Disney to forge a bond with a new generation of consumers who may be unaware of the company's characters and stories.

This is crucial because gov quotas on foreign films restrict Disney's marketing there.