Hollywood culture hits cutting room floor as foreign financing builds
FOR decades it has broadcast American culture across the globe. Today, Hollywood fears that, increasingly, it is being held hostage by foreign audiences.
Last week, Disney announced that the third movie of its successful Iron Man franchise, starring Robert Downey Jr, would be co-produced with a Chinese partner, DMG Entertainment, a studio with close ties to Beijing.
Just days earlier, it emerged that Anil Ambani, the Indian billionaire, would be pumping about $US200 million ($193.8m) into Steven Spielberg's studio, DreamWorks.
The two deals were part of a decades-long trend whereby the pendulum of box-office power has swayed away from the US. When Star Wars was released in 1977, nearly 60 per cent of takings came from North America. In 2009, the comparable figure for Avatar was just 27 per cent.
Hollywood has always welcomed deep-pocketed foreigners. When Sony, the Japanese giant, bought Columbia Pictures in 1989 for $US3.4 billion, it was said to be "buying the soul of America", although Sony was later deemed to have overpaid. Additionally, until the credit crunch hit in 2008, many films were financed by hedge fund money that came from all over the world.......
Never before has Hollywood agreed to carve up a multi-billion-dollar franchise with a foreign player in such a manner. The message was inescapable: Tinseltown's future now lies largely in the hands of overseas film buffs.........
Other upcoming Sino-American co-productions include a sci-fi thriller starring Bruce Willis. And when Lincoln, Spielberg's biopic of the 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln, hits screens later this year, it will be thanks to Indian money.
Spielberg is rumoured to have turned to Mr Ambani for funding because the Mumbai-based industrialist was willing to give the director far more creative freedom than other potential investors. Elsewhere, a reliance on overseas cash may prove inhibitive. To be shown in China, Iron Man 3 will have to pass strict censors. Said Dan Mintz, the US chief executive of DMG Entertainment: "Back home, you're really only concerned with one group of people: the consumer. In China, you have to be good at handling the government and the consumer."
The prospect of Iron Man becoming an instrument of Chinese "soft power" will upset many Americans........
But perhaps the biggest criticism of the growing importance of overseas cash comes from cinema aficionados. They complain Hollywood is preoccupied with dumb action movies, as studios hope to hook foreign audiences with films that rely little on dialogue.
As The Economist put it: "An explosion is an explosion, regardless of language."
Whether that argument stands up to scrutiny is debatable. Even Black Swan, a psychological thriller feted by critics, relied on foreigners for more than two thirds of its takings. For the cerebral Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the figure was 70 per cent.
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