Thursday 4 August 2022 11:46 PM Erik Prince: Top Gun: Maverick shows how Hollywood has woken up to threat from ... trends now
The huge success of 'Top Gun: Maverick' shows that even Hollywood has now realized the threat posed by China, according to military contractor Erik Prince, who praised the movie on Thursday for restoring a Taiwan patch to Tom Cruise's famous jacket.
A trailer for the movie in 2019 raised fears that producers were bowing to China's new financial might by removing two of the patches that were seen on Cruise's back in the original movie.
However, they were eventually restored despite worries the presence of a patch representing the autonomous island nation would offend Beijing.
'It's amazing to see Hollywood has come alive to the fact that a movie like Top Gun that is pro-America, and kind of stands up to China because China was complaining about the mere patch of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's jacket,' Prince told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast, which was recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas.
Prince and Bannon have long railed against the threat of communist China.
Tom Cruise's original jacket (left) showed patches with the flags of Japan and Taiwan. In the 2019 trailer (right) they had been replaced with patches with generic symbols
On Thursday, military contractor Erik Prince said the reinstatement of the Taiwan patch showed that Hollywood was now alert to the threat from an emboldened China
Prince made his comments on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, which was broadcast from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas
And they have criticized liberals for being too slow to react and mistakenly believing that helping China develop would turn the country into a peace-loving democracy.
In recent years, Hollywood has tried to cash in with Chinese audiences by avoiding using China as an aggressor in action movies.
But Prince said the producers of Top Gun had managed to make money by standing up to the Chinese.
'And that movie did over a billion dollars,' he said. 'Amazing.
'And so Hollywood has woken up.'
The controversy erupted in 2019 when eagle eyed viewers of a trailer for the sequel noticed something
