If you want a quick demonstration of why movie studios might go to extremes to make sure their films aren’t banned from the Chinese box office, you don’t need to look any further than the planetary box office totals for 2025: Even if you skip past the number one slot—thoroughly dominated by Chinese animated picture Ne Zha 2, whose $2.2 billion scored it a No. 5 spot on the list of highest-grossing films of all time—the entry right below it is Disney’s Zootopia 2. While that film eventually became the highest-grossing domestic movie of the year (having finally crept past A Minecraft Movie in this, its 13th week in theaters) the sequel made roughly a third of its overall $1.8 billion in China. There’s nothing new about the fact that getting a film past China’s notoriously stringent censors can mean hundreds of millions in additional revenue for a studio—but even so, some requests to make the foreign government happy are apparently a little too much even for Hollywood executives to stomach.
Take a recent interview that Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman gave to Puck‘s Matt Belloni (per THR) on his podcast The Town this week, in which he revealed that he’s still bitter that 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home—the first movie to crack the fabled $1 billion mark in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns—only ended up topping out at $1.9 billion, specifically because it didn’t get a Chinese release. Rothman says the Chinese Film Authority only had a “small thing” they wanted removed from the film in order to secure a Chinese berth for it: The Statue Of Liberty. Which, as viewers of the multiversal romp know, is where the entirety of the film’s climax takes place, as twenty years’ worth of Spider-Men and their various villains go swinging all around Lady Liberty.
Given that No Way Home‘s predecessor, Spider-Man: Far From Home, made $200 million in China, we would understand why Sony might have been tempted to try to figure something out. (The studio even commissioned a Chinese poster for the movie, to no avail.) But Rothman ultimately vetoed the idea, telling Belloni, “I really didn’t look forward to sitting in front of Congress, telling them why I cut the Statue of Liberty out at the request of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Rothman was talking about the Spider-films in the context of Sony’s apparently evergreen hope of making a Spider-Man-free Spider-Man movie (that isn’t Venom) that actually makes any damn money at the box office. The one-two 2024 punch of Madame Web and Kraven The Hunter apparently didn’t completely kill the idea of a standalone live-action Spider-Verse, but Rothman did acknowledge that Sony is planning a “fresh reboot” with “new people” to try to make its various Spidey-related properties work in theaters. If they do, they might want to be really careful about which national landmarks they send, like, The Lizard clambering all over in the process.
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