A Study on the Cultural Misreading of Film Mulan

Abstract

As a typical cross-cultural dissemination blockbuster, Disney's live-action film Mulan was released in China in September 2020, and has attracted worldwide attention. However, after its release in China, the film received low box office and poor word-of-mouth, which polarized the film compared to its high word-of-mouth abroad In view of this phenomenon, this paper studies why the box office is low and why the word of mouth is poor. The first is to collect relevant data of films through the box office market and network channels; the second is to conduct comparative analysis with other types of cross-cultural dissemination films; the third is to study the film itself from the perspective of dissemination and culture. The film cost $200 million to make but took in $42 million at the Chinese box office, falling short of expectations. Douban.com, a Chinese film rating site, scored a low 4.9 points. It was found that the application of Chinese culture in the film does not conform to the cognitive mental state of Chinese viewers, resulting in cultural misreading. From the perspective of cognitive mental state and culture, the film is interpreted and the reasons are analyzed. The coders' cognitive dissemination bias towards Chinese culture leads to cultural misreading, which is reflected in the application, integration and dissemination of culture. The integration and expression of Chinese and Western cultures transmitted across cultures by taking Chinese culture as the shell are ineffective. The core culture uses western knight culture, which leads to the inadaptable cross-cultural mental state interpretation of Chinese audiences in the process of watching and decoding the film. This paper makes an in-depth analysis of the problems in films and puts forward countermeasures to improve the box office and reputation of such films. First, in the process of making films related to Traditional Chinese culture, it is necessary to understand Chinese culture, improve cognitive mental state and grasp the core of Chinese stories; second, in the process of making films related to Traditional Chinese culture, it needs to realize that if there are problems of cross-cultural dissemination, how to adopt real-time strategies is very important for the dissemination effect of films. Thirdly, the epidemic has caused great losses to the film industry around the world. In particular, cinema films are limited by the epidemic, and audiences cannot go to the cinema to watch movies, resulting in a collapse of the global box office. In view of the difficulties, it is necessary to make reasonable use of new media platforms to maximize the publicity effect with less investment and promote films through new media platforms.