“Furious 7,” for example, earned $390 million in China - more than it made in the United States - and was for a time the highest-grossing film ever in the country.Īnd just as Hollywood has begun to crack the market, Chinese cinema has come into its own. These days, Hollywood studios hardly greenlight a blockbuster without first asking, “How will this play in China?” The rewards are too vast. China’s booming movie market grew by nearly 50 percent last year and is expected to surpass North America’s as the largest in the world by next year. “Ip Man 3” went on to gross $115 million at the box office in China, with more than half of that coming on the opening weekend. They also spoke about self-reinvention, something each man knows quite a bit about. The pair discussed their young daughters, Montessori schools and, inevitably, boxing. “He was not at all what I expected,” Kos-Read says. (The Village Voice later described Tyson’s performance in the film as “ sadly unimpressive.”) Kos-Read introduced himself and over the next three days developed a bond with Tyson. The retired fighter had been cast, perhaps misguidedly, as Frank. When he showed up to the set, the mystery was solved almost immediately: There, slouching on a stool surrounded by a scrum of people, was the former heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson. A few days later, he boarded a plane from Beijing to Shanghai to begin filming. “I felt threatened,” he told me recently, only half kidding. Kos-Read sent panicked texts to the movie’s casting director, but they went unanswered. Who, Kos-Read wondered, would the producers have cast instead of him? Last December he appeared in the action film “Mojin - The Lost Legend,” currently the fifth-highest-grossing movie in Chinese history. He is famous throughout the mainland, and his career has been on a steady upward trajectory. Kos-Read, who is known in China only as Cao Cao, is by far the leading foreign actor working in the country today, having appeared in about 100 movies and television programs since his career began in 1999. Kos-Read was thrilled until he read the script and noticed another part for a foreign actor - a bigger and better role as a mobster named Frank. The role was small, but his agent negotiated what Kos-Read considered an “outrageous” amount of money for it, and the producers agreed. Here’s one: Not long ago, the 43-year-old American actor received a call with an offer to appear in “Ip Man 3,” the third in a series of biopics about Bruce Lee’s martial-arts master. Jonathan Kos-Read has more than his share. Every foreigner living in China has his share of China Stories.

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