Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst Page A

loved our movie stars, from the silent movies to Marilyn Monroe. Big stars = big bucks. They are a beat behind (one of my international sales-agent pals told me, “We love the stars of the immediate past!”), so the hot young things that the domestic audience loves won’t sell. This makes casting hard, as Sandy and Meryl can make only so many movies, and Julia and Angelina have a lot of babies.
    It should be pointed out that one of Sandy’s points of adoration abroad, besides constantly batting her hits out of the ballpark, is that she is fluent in German, does an occasional ad campaign in Germany and does all of her press junkets in perfect German. Her numbers there are astronomical. (Her mom was a German opera singer and spoke German in the house.) So too with Jodie Foster, whose numbers are great internationally, along with her acting choices, which favor action. She is fluent in French, does an occasional advertising campaign in France, does her junkets in witty, jaunty French and lives in Paris part-time. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem both score high numbers in Spain. Milla Jovovich, not surprisingly, is big in Russia. A little cosmopolitanism goes a long way these days.
    Our romantic comedies have often performed well in Europe, particularly in Germany, and also, interestingly, in Japan, despite the studios’ lack of interest in the international market when making them. Gianopulos would say that the successes in this genre are typically star-dependent, and on average this seems true—thus Sandy Bullock’s huge numbers abroad. The success of our syndicated television shows in France, Germany, England, Scandinavia, Australia and elsewhere has made our customs and stars familiar to many territories, and therefore our mating rituals are somewhat adorable. But there is doing well ($110 to $120 million) and thereis doing great ($600 million to $1 billion), and the billion-dollar payday the studios are looking for doesn’t reside in success in “Old Europe,” as the studios say with almost equal disdain as Donald Rumsfeld did. The business there is too small to impress them.
    More ominously, Sanford Panitch, of Fox’s new international production division Fox International Productions (FIP), tells me that indigenous romantic comedies are the new rage; they are now being made based on local romantic customs in local languages with local talent for a lesser price. They no longer need our rom-coms for style, trends, etc.—movies have been replaced by the Net as cultural carrier pigeon. Without our biggest brand-name stars, our movies will be dinosaurs, replaced by local ones. This makes sense. As Gianopulos says, you can make a $5 to $10 million romantic comedy in any country in the world, in the local idiom, with local stars. But because of our technical prowess and the enormous costs involved, you can only make Avatar, Transformers, Inception and The Dark Knight in America.
    YOUR MOVIES? WE CAN MAKE THEM! WITH YOU!
    We are great imperialists. We are also the best distributors. So call us the running dog of imperialist distributors.
    Movies are a vital, critical and growing U.S. export. But increasingly, most countries want a larger share of their own movies to be released locally. Many countries, such as India (which has the most successful indigenous movie industry in the world), Australia, England, Japan, Korea, France, Hong Kong, Mexico, Russia and Spain, have bustling and historic film communities that severely limit imports. One idea to remedy this loss of income is to participate in local production in some way. What way? Finance and distribute! Each studio has distribution offices in each territoryfor its own releases, and some of these headquarters are becoming financing sources for local production and/or offering new opportunities for wide-ranging international distribution for local products. Capitalism at work!
    Fox is enjoying fast success in indigenous production with its new Fox International