> They need to wean themselves from the largely mistaken belief that uber-expensive movie stars drive box office attendance (overseas, they do; domestically, there's almost zero correlation).
I hate to tell you this, but the formula of using big movie stars for oversees growth won't be changing anytime soon: Hollywood had another record year in their _actual_ growth market, which is the foreign box office.
I'd love to see a more robust domestic box office, but wishing won't make it so. At the cost of films these days, global box office results will continue to dominate, and I expect 2012 to be even more lopsided.
Before the decade is out, I expect the US to be down to less than 20% of total worldwide box office.
All absolutely true, but what it tells me is that the same product isn't really working in both markets, with the occasional big exception. There's no question that the overseas markets are the growth engine of the business, though.
But I wonder how long the era of one-size-fits-all product for all territories can last. Eventually, specialized studios for each market could swoop in with better localized product using the same stars. It's tempting to think that the era of globalization will give us a homogenous set of middle-class consumers worldwide, all with roughly the same tastes. In practice, though, local culture and preferences still matter in a big way. The question is whether local culture is on its way out with globalization, and accordingly, whether local tastes are simply artifacts of the pre-global marketplace. Or, frankly, if a new global homogeneity is emerging, how likely that standard is to be set outside of the US. Twenty years from now, which consumers will be deciding what's cool for the rest of the globe? The US middle class seems like a largely spent force in that role.
I hate to tell you this, but the formula of using big movie stars for oversees growth won't be changing anytime soon: Hollywood had another record year in their _actual_ growth market, which is the foreign box office.
I'd love to see a more robust domestic box office, but wishing won't make it so. At the cost of films these days, global box office results will continue to dominate, and I expect 2012 to be even more lopsided.
Before the decade is out, I expect the US to be down to less than 20% of total worldwide box office.