First off, mods I apologize if this post violates the sub rules, but I kinda started looking into this and I thought it was interesting, topical and definitely movie related.
TL;DR: James seems very likely to have taken Chinese money to make the upcoming Space Jam 2, which almost certainly had some influence on his recent comments on China/HK.
So to start, LeBron made some controversial comments on China and the HK protests yesterday; in a nutshell, he appeared to indirectly support the Chinese government over the HK protesters despite James' long history of being very thoughtful in public comments and very pro-social justice on a ton of different issues. This was a shock to the social media universe - to say the least - and there has been a fair amount of (deserved, IMHO) backlash today.
There was a thread yesterday on r/movies yesterday about the hypocrisy of Hollywood vis a vie the HK/China situation, and it got me wondering if LeBron James' was motivated, not only by basketball, but also by movies.
Lebron, and several other NBA players, spent this summer filming Space Jam 2 for a 2021 release. Notably James is also a producer on the film, meaning he has a double interest in making it successful and very likely has a chunk of personal money on the line - he's double incentivized to see it succeed.
So first off, its obvious that James wants the movie released in China because it will make mega-millions there; there is no question about that. But I also wanted to look at the movie financing side of things too. It has an initial budget of appx $100M, but its really hard to source where the money came from, although it does appear that the production is receiving ~$22M in production credits from the state of CA.
However, one of the production companies caught my eye: Perfect Storm Entertainment. The 'face' of Perfect Storm is a guy named Justin Lin, who we all know from his directing/producing Star Trek Beyond and several of the Fast and Furious movies, in addition to Community and True Detective. But there's another guy that's part of Perfect Storm Entertainment - the money guy - who is a Beijing based media-billionaire named Bruno Wu. And we all know that if you are a billionaire in Beijing, you are allowed to exist at the sole-discretion of the ruling party there - there are no exceptions.
And then I dug up this article from a few years ago. Below I copy/pasted the meaty part, but the gist is that it looks like Perfect Storm Entertainment is a vehicle to allow Chinese money to get into Hollywood films:
Filmmaker Justin Lin and Beijing-based media mogul Bruno Wu are producers.....through their joint venture Perfect Storm Entertainment. Lin is perhaps most famous for directing three movies in the Fast & Furious franchise.
Wu told the LA Times: “Chinese movie investors are now thinking about going global. In the meantime, you see Hollywood trying to form better collaboration with Chinese players. This is really a golden moment for a company like ours.”
So I'd say that Perfect Storm Entertainment's involvement in Space Jam 2 is a pretty good (although not perfect) indicator that the movie is being funded, at least in part - probably a major part - by Chinese investors. Lin himself isn't involved In SJ2, which begs the question 'why involve Perfect Storm at all, if it wasn't for raising money?"
And to be fair to James, everything here is circumstantial, and we will never know his reasons for taking the China stance that he did - I'm sure he's being pulled in a lot of directions on this. Buuuuuut....this arrangement looks really suspect, and its hard for me to imagine a world where this upcoming film, and the fact that James is very likely in bed with a lot of Chinese money didn't influence his opinion on China/HK.
So boycott Space Jam 2?
EDIT: I'm not saying that we should boycott SJ2 - I meant that a little more teasing than anything else. But it is really interesting how deep the US-China ties go in areas that we would never expect on the surface.