21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation

CHAPTER THREE: The Globalization of the Moving Image

87 C CHAPTER THREE The Globalization of the Moving Image While Hollywood, with its vast technical resources and its perceived dominance of commercial cinema continues on a global scale, the massive effort to shift to digital ultimately opens the way for significant changes in global distribution and creates new platforms and methods that question global Hollywood in exciting and unprecedented ways. One would think that the success, on a global scale, of an international blockbuster such as Avatar would assure Hollywood’s continued dominance . Mark Lynch doesn’t think so. His essay, “What If Hollywood Doesn’t Survive as a Global Player?,” demonstrates that Hollywood’s supremacy is far from a sure thing. Interestingly, Lynch argues that Hollywood’s increased dependence on global markets actually undermines its sustainability in the domestic box office. In the past, American moviemakers were not as dependent on international success; as Lynch comments, “forty years ago, give or take, Hollywood was transformed by Altman, Coppola, Polanski and others at their commercial and critical peak.” But that success was not predicated on the international market. Amazing as it sounds today, those filmmakers and many others “were largely sustained by the domestic box office alone” (see Lynch). Granted, there was some success in foreign markets, but Hollywood didn’t depend upon it. These days, blockbuster success is often indebted entirely to foreign markets. Indeed, many Hollywood films that don’t do well domestically only 88 21ST-CENTURY HOLLYWOOD break even because of international bookings. Films are now routinely pushed decisively into the black by global playoff as well as by ancillary marketing on DVD and other platforms. Hollywood’s old model of success, as Lynch argues, may actually lead to its downfall. In a world where $100 million “has been the yardstick of box-office success,” Lynch predicts that Hollywood will have to radically alter a business model in which “profligacy [has] gone mad” and film-production costs have been driven to stratospheric levels by “squadrons of producers, executives, agents, managers, lawyers, PR handlers, etc.” Hollywood has been slow to adapt to, much less notice , the fact that its “grasp on the global popular imagination has definitely waned. The American way as the definitive way is a dead idea.” Hollywood’s global dominance of filmic consumption is no sure thing. In many ways, Lynch argues, Hollywood is not keeping up with global changes. It does not, for example, routinely take advantage of social media networking websites; and as Lynch sees it, “rather than exploiting its information sensibly, Hollywood subsidizes TV and print media” instead being subsidized by them, as it sometimes appears . People outside the United States increasingly want to see their own stars and their own cultures, and they want to hear their own languages spoken in films. They will turn out for proven franchises such as Iron Man; but interestingly, there seem to be trends in international filmmaking that point away from the model of Hollywood’s hegemonic dominance in production and exhibition patterns. China is a good case in point. There has been an unprecedented increase in the success of Chinese films made for Chinese audiences. Due to a variety of reasons, Chinese films have “topped foreign films at the local box office for five years running” (see Hendrix). Revenue growth has increased by 25 percent each year; and as Grady Hendrix notes in an article in Slate, “China has nurtured a new generation of directors who make Chinese hits for Chinese audiences,” a groundbreaking and revolutionary trend that has hardly registered with American executives or journalists. The Chinese government and SARFT (the Chinese censorship authority) have completely reinvigorated the landscape of Chinese cinema toward nurturing local talent and local film distribution and ensuring domestic fiscal success. The government now limits 89 THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE MOVING IMAGE foreign imports to “22 films per year, encouraging the expansion of the number of screens . . . yanking successful American movies from theaters in the middle of their runs, promoting blackout dates when only local productions can be distributed, and generally making life hell for foreign producers and distributors” (see Hendrix). The new Chinese hitmakers are not dependent on international global distribution, nor are they making dumbed-down films fashioned after the Hollywood genre blockbuster. Chinese blockbuster film hits are, according to Hendrix, “complicated, fascinating films . . . and they’re all far better than Zhang Yimou’s recent string...