Covering the arts-and-culture beat at my old Washington Times job, I wrote a feature on what seemed like a promising development: Because of digital-cinema technology, the cineplex was becoming an alternative-media platform where you could see much else besides movies.

The opera, for example. A live broadcast of the Super Bowl in 3-D. Highlights from the South by Southwest music festival. All manner of programming aimed at niche audiences:

Digital-cinema technology holds out the industry-wide promise of radically cheaper distribution costs and a 3-D format that could fetch higher ticket prices. And the benefit to exhibitors of alternative content — more bodies — is immediately tangible.

Five years later, this development is … still in development.

The transition from print to digital continues, but domestic box-office receipts, including for 3-D movies, are in decline. According to the indispensable film writer Anne Thompson, the industry is looking abroad — especially to China, where box office and new theater construction are booming — to boost growth.

So it’s somewhat surprising that a Chinese real-estate magnate’s gaze is in the opposite direction: toward North America. The New York Times’s David Barboza reports:

Wang Jianlin, a rags-to-riches tycoon, is taking over AMC Entertainment, North America’s second-largest movie theater chain behind Regal Entertainment. And he is promising to integrate it into a new, made in China, global brand called the Wanda Group.

Apparently, the acquisition is as much symbolic as it is profit-driven: Wang believes —  as does, no doubt, the Chinese government — that the movie business will lend the Chinese global cachet and cultural influence.

Movies themselves are unquestionably a means of projecting “soft power.” But a bricks-and-mortar theater chain? I’m less sure.

Then again, it’s not like Wang is interested in investing in a truly dying breed, such as, say, shopping malls.

Wait, what?

“We don’t have the strategy to go global in real estate,” Wang told the Times. “But for globalization and going out, we would like to buy hotels and hotel management companies. We also like department stores [emphasis mine].

Is it possible that we’re witnessing a Chinese iteration of the once-feared Japanese takeover of America in the 1980s — I mean in the sense that the Chinese still think it’s 1980?