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I don't think your explanation necessarily contradicts mine. A set of smaller studios could target different markets and it'd be fine for a small studio to ignore China - US market is enough for it, and you don't need to squeeze every last dollar to pay for it, there's plenty of market for many small players. For a megacorp, you need mage-movies with mega-budgets and you can't pay for those without China.
As for Russia, I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad. Surely, they have an oppressive uni-party regime where there's no free speech and your rights depend on whether you agree or not with the ruling party. But that'd only make the wokes to envy them, not despise them - freedom is a red-tribe word. Of course, Russians hate gays and transes, but I don't think we're ready for a movie where Russia invades Wakanda to kill all gay people there, and the heroic Rainbow Transvengers push them back and perform the pride parade in the Red Square. Not yet at least, give it time. In the times of the Cold War, it was simple - Russians are commies that hate Our Way Of Life (TM). But now we know that Our Way Of Life (TM) is racist, colonialist, patriarchal and long overdue for deconstructing and dismantling. And the communists (if under slightly different names) are sitting on the board of every academic institution and are proudly represented in Congress. So where exactly is the good/evil line? I don't think Hollywood would be able to articulate it better than "they are bad because they are against us, and we are good!" - especially while at the same time releasing 50 movies about how we're actually very very bad.
This is a strange take to me. Have you heard much in the way of woke takes on foreign policy? Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad. It fits neatly into the broader oppression dynamics as well as the hatred of imperialism. They also vaguely see Russia as fascist, and many comfortably assert that red tribe and/or Trump has a love affair with Russia, which is reason enough to hate them, and has broadly built a "current thing" alignment against Russia for years. I have constantly been seeing woke people disavow tankies in spaces where they were previously tolerated or at least seen as a lesser evil. The real question is whether they will be willing to acknowledge the importance of the US's place in the world if that's what it takes to stand against something like Russia.
There was a lot of drama in my woke spaces over games like Call of Duty portraying poor innocent Russia as bad, back in 2019. These kinds of arguments were very common and have suddenly become extinct.
Russia invaded a number of places before Ukraine, and nobody had any trouble with that. Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Central Africa...
Well, Russia is fascist, but I don't see anybody on US political scene daring to officially recognize the fact, even among the wokes. For the wokes though, "fascist" is a bad word to call everybody they hate, not a political taxonomy term, so they can't hate somebody for being fascist - they call somebody fascist after they already hate them. And since everybody by now knows the link between Trump and Russia is wholesale fake (it doesn't mean they wouldn't LARP as if they believed it's true, but they know it's false) - unlike the link between Russia and Clintons, say - again, they link Trump to Russia because they hate Trump, not the other way around. In Obama years, people who thought Russia is a threat were laughed at. In Trump years, people who thought Europe needs to beef their defenses against Russia were laughed at. So we back to the question why would they hate Russia enough, per se. They don't hate Iran and North Korea and China - at least no more than political expediency requires them to perform - despite those being no less oppressive than Russia (though currently not invading their neighbors). Is the invading the only thing? So if Russia is beaten back to their pre-Feb-2022 borders, would the hate go away?
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I'm not saying they admire Soviets or Russians (though some of them definitely did when Russians were Soviets) - what I am saying is it'd be hard for them to cast Russians as a convincing movie villain without undermining their own message. "They are villains because they restrict homosexuality" is not going to make you a billion dollars in movie receipts I'm afraid.
Oh no, there's actually a huge difference, but that'd take us way off topic I think.
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Well, starting from communists, for them it is about power. It's not only about power, but the classic communist revolution must result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. No setup where it's not the case can be recognized by a communist as legitimate, and any such setup must be overthrown. Now, when they have the power, there's still much work to be done, and that's where communists go Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea and splinter into various *isms. But that's after the power has been captured.
Conservatives are probably the closest ones to your description - they need power to prevent people from doing bad things and to force them to do good things. As long as that's what is happening, the application of power is unnecessary.
The classical liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, are probably the farthest, because they reject application of power to force people to behave in certain ways, unless that behavior comes into immediate conflict with a narrow set of natural rights (such as murder, bodily harm, theft of property, etc.). Applying power just to make sure people don't do something you think is not good, even if it does not violate their rights, is contrary to this mindset. Here, the power is to be used as little as it is possible to keep the whole system from collapsing into chaos (anarchists would claim this minimum is actually zero).
Now modern liberals, they are somewhat similar to conservatives towards application of power, but with couple important twists. First, good things are never enough - the standards evolve and change constantly, and the continuous application of power is necessary to keep up, what was perfectly good a year ago, is an appalling bigotry today. Second, there's a class of natural standard-setters, who define and re-define these constantly evolving and changing standards, and those people are the only legitimate candidates for holding power (not all of them will hold power, but all power holding should be done by them only, or it is illegitimate and should be resisted by any means). Also, since their vision involves forcible redistribution of resources from people who have them to people who "deserve" them (standard-setters identify those) but don't have them, this again requires constant application of power. So while the power is not the end in itself, their vision necessitates constant control and exercise of power.
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