Furthermore, the fixation with Caucasian foreigners across Chinese industries like fashion, entertainment and even education, makes someone like Damon a hugely popular choice for the Chinese market. This gives The Great Wall a very different context from Dreamworks' Ghost In The Shell adaptation: Damon, whose high-grossing performance in The Martian was one of 12 officially released to the Chinese public in 2015, remains a well-known figure in the Mainland.

The film also is, to date, the most expensive production in the mainland, with a whopping budget of $150 million. While it's certainly bizarre to see Jason Bourne cavorting in stylized ancient Chinese war gear among a near-full complement of famous Chinese stars, The Great Wall is a little bit more complicated than your average Hollywood whitewashing.Īs a co-production between Legendary, LeVision and The China Film Group, with Universal picking up the distribution rights, creating a movie like The Great Wall raises the issues of casting in Chinese/American co-productions, especially in light of the film's ambitious goals for both American and Chinese markets: the film is shot in English, but production and post-production almost exclusively took place on the Mainland, with Zhang as the director. Twitter, hot on the heels of the controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson's casting as Major Motoko Kusanagi in the upcoming Hollywood adaptation of Ghost In the Shell, was quick to condescend Damon's role as the latest in a series of white actors being cast in ostensibly Asian roles. However, not everyone has been enthusiastic about the American actors taking to the stone-strewn foundation of one of China's most-coveted pieces of architectural heritage.

Fresh off the red carpet from the latest installment of Paul Greengrass's Jason Bourne series, Matt Damon and co-star Willem Dafoe can now be found slinging arrows at mythical monsters in the new trailer for The Great Wall, veteran director Zhang Yimou's new project.

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