Foreign Sales Trends

Foreign Sales of U.S. Made Films Slowing Down

Over all, American studios depend on foreign markets for roughly half of total revenue. The numbers should give pause to Hollywood. When the summer selling season is over, studios will probably collect far less from international markets than they would have with a larger roster of high-budget fantasies like “Spider-Man 3” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

The worse news for Hollywood is that new movies may be feeding a non-American tendency in once-dependable foreign markets like France and South Korea. “Pop culture used to be American pop culture. But the rest of the world is figuring out how to make pop culture of its own.”

A weak dollar has partially masked soft spots in Hollywood’s dominance of worldwide sales. According to The Hollywood Reporter, foreign revenue collected by the six biggest American studios rose 9 percent, to $20.2 billion, even as domestic revenue fell 7 percent, to $22.7 billion.

But the euro was surging against the dollar which made foreign ticket sales and DVDs appear to yield more when translated into dollars.

Examined more closely, some markets have made a distinct shift away from movies made in the United States, and toward films produced locally or in other countries.

In France, where the total box office is up to about $1.5 billion a year, American films accounted for an average of 56.3 percent of ticket sales in the last four years of the 1990s, peaking at 64 percent in 1998, as “Titanic” circled the globe. Since 2004, the American share of the French market has averaged just 47.5 percent, peaking in 2007 at 50.3 percent, according to numbers from Global Media Intelligence.

South Korea tells a similar story. American films have been grabbing less than half the market there even in a robust, fantasy-filled year like 2007, after reaping more than 70 percent of ticket sales in 1998. “D-War,” a South Korean film about aliens devastating the planet, edged “Transformers” with a plot that ran along similar lines, for the No. 1 spot last year.

In Japan, reaction has been similarly cool to “27 Dresses”, “Bee Movie,” and “Wild Hogs,” all hits in the United States. Instead “Aibo: Gekijo-ban,” (or “Partners: Theatrical Version”) a crime thriller based on a popular television series, has been the year’s runaway hit.