Multipolarity is a word that has escaped lot of lips for a few years. Claims are abound that the world order based on American unipolarity in the age of neoliberalism is no more. What will succeed it is a post-neoliberal world system of multipolarity developing as we speak, or at least one where America’s position more resembles “first among equals”.
Whatever the merits and demerits this narrative of American ‘decline’ may or may not have in the realm of geopolitics, in the realm of the global film landscape, however, perhaps it might be onto something.
Hollywood is clearly in a tough spot now. While heavy hitters like Sinners, Superman and Wicked have done well (though at North America and European box office, less so at the Asian box office), in the past few months many dramas and comedies like Mickey 17, Die My Love, Christy and The Smashing Machine have been released, with heavy marketing, seal of approval from critics and loaded with star power. Yet, they have flopped worse than a soggy pancake. Virtually none of them became a hit or made an imprint on the culture. There has also been a post-Covid reduction in the exclusive theatrical window before they go on streaming. In October, as per the New York Times, “theatres in the United States and Canada collected $445 million across all titles in October, the lowest total on record” (excluding 2020). For contrast, October ticket sales in 2019 totalled $1 billion.
It’s not just domestic pressures Hollywood is facing, but more interestingly, international ones too. As Bloomberg reported in September, Hollywood’s “share of the global box office has shrunk from 92% to 66% in the last two decades”.
How has this happened? Is this just distaste with Trump’s America? Is the charm of Americana withering away? Or is there something else at play? Well, ever since the gloomy days of the Covid-19 pandemic – when the world was pretty much brought to a standstill – within a number of countries, mainly in Asia, audiences have opted to watch more locally produced films instead of Hollywood imports.
The storming success of Ne Zha 2 is symbolic of this trend. It earned over $2 billion at the box office, becoming the first animated film to boast of that number. Almost all of that money was earned within China. Since Covid, there has been a steady ‘decoupling’ between Beijing and Hollywood. In 2019, there were nine Hollywood films that earned at least $100 million in China. In 2023 and 2024, it was just two, and in 2025 it was only one. In 2023, all the top 10 highest grossing films in China were Chinese films. None were imported films. In 2024, nine out of the top 10 were Chinese films. Donald Trump’s tariffs will only further boost the growth of the Chinese domestic film market.
How ironic it was that Hollywood spent so long trying to unleash the potential of the Chinese market? Capitalists want a reservoir of rich customers to sell their products to. Dirt poor people are not useful to make a profit from. The reality of a billion Chinese becoming more affluent was obviously salivating to Hollywood executives, knowing that the Chinese market would compete with North America as the largest box office market. That’s why they invested so much and tailored so many of their blockbusters specifically for China, to the point of flattening their narratives in favour of special effects driven spectacles and kow towing to censorship. And yet, it was a Chinese animated film, not them, that showed just how much could be earned.
If this was only occurring in China, then one could dismiss it as the result of state enforced protectionism from the tariff wars with the United States. You can easily say Ne Zha 2 is an outlier, so there’s nothing to see here. But it’s not just limited to China. In Japan, where Hollywood has routinely taken at least half of the box office, Japanese films earned about 75 percent of the market in 2024 while imported titles slumped to $329 million. A similar, though less striking shift, can be observed in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. For a Hollywood that earns a majority of its box office revenue (70%) outside of North America, this can’t be ignored.
While Hollywood imports have never been real competition in India as local films – whether Bollywood or the other regional film industries – have long had domestic dominance, it is rather telling that in 2024 Hollywood imports had their lowest market share (8%) in a decade, dropping from the peak of 15% in 2019. Outside of Asia, in Nigeria, home of Nollywood, in 2024, for the first time Nigerian movies earned a majority of the market share of the box office.
It would be easy to portray this as a matter of Hollywood decline. Except for Sinners, all the top ten highest grossing Hollywood films of this year have either been sequels or IP-based. The market for adult based mid-budget films is as weak as ever. The quality of the exorbitantly budgeted blockbusters coming out of Hollywood is for the most part, turgid and there is plenty of fatigue with the Marvel formula. The over reliance on drab remakes and sequels has taken the shine off Hollywood blockbusters. They neither have charm or even provide good popcorn entertainment.
But the other side of the story is the maturation of the film industries of these developing countries. It is a sign of a healthy national film industry if it has and retains the majority of the audience in its own country. Because of economic and technological progress, production value has become more efficient and the technical gap isn’t as stark as it once was. Earlier it simply wasn’t possible for a country like China to make an animated film set in a Chinese context that could look as polished as a Disney or Pixar flick. Now it has. And its people want to watch them.
It shouldn’t be remarkable that, say, an Indonesian, with some disposable income, seeing that their country has a developing and maturing national cinema, would adjust their film diet where most of the films they consume would be Indonesian films, made in Indonesia and spoken in their native Bahasa Indonesian. This doesn’t mean that their diet doesn’t also include Hollywood and other foreign films. People’s tastes are multi-dimensional and if they have the choice before them they will express them.
Some months ago, I watched via Netflix Home Sweet Loan, a simple but meaningful story on the misfortunes of the Sandwich Generation, Millennial and Gen-Z middle class Indonesians who are stuck between caring for their ageing parents as well as trying to live their own independent lives and start their own families. As ever with society pulled between the poles of tradition and modernity, this burden falls especially hard on women, stuck between obligations to family and their desire to, as Virginia Woolf put it, to have a room of one’s own.
Although Indonesia is still notorious for its contributions to the horror genre, that socially resonant films like Home Sweet Loan as well as animated films like Jumbo 2 are being made and are hits among Indonesians show how much their film industry is diversifying. It would be very hard for a foreigner, let alone a Westerner from Hollywood, to make this sort of film, with its intimacy with an Indonesian society in flux. Moreover, many of these films at least offer more genre variety, mid-budget dramas aimed at adults and seem less generic. They feel grounded, relatable, comforting even, or at least encouraging.
So, what are the implications for the future of global film culture? We have been raised with a cliche that 21st century globalisation is synonymous with McDonaldization or some other form of American cultural imperialism. That’s one way of looking at it – a rather narrow one. But there is another side to this dialectic. Fatima Bhutto made an interesting, if flawed, argument that American hegemony in soft-power is being challenged by ascendant forms of non-Western pop culture – Bollywood, Kpop, Turkish soaps and, I would add myself, Afrobeats that resonate more with their particular experience. Cultural influence is taking place where America, or ‘the West’, isn’t at the centre, whether as giver or receiver but within and between the ‘South’.
The dynamics of actually existing globalisation are far more complex, dialectical and interesting than the simple tale of Americanisation, especially in as far as film and media are concerned. Rather than being flattened into homogeneity, in the words of anthropologist Richard Wilk, we “are portraying, dramatizing, and communicating our differences to each other in ways that are more widely intelligible.”
One cannot ignore the streaming revolution, that has vastly democratised the films and television shows we watch in an unprecedented manner. Netflix has invested a lot in non-English language films and shows. This is partially the result of increased demand from American audiences, especially Gen-Z’s crave for Japanese and Korean dramas. The world is exporting to America as much as America exports to the world. As the examples of Squid Game, La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) and Lupin have shown, a non-English language show can become a global hit. They remain culturally specific but are globally relevant. Indeed, their cultural specificity is part of their attraction. It gives it that so desired quality: ’authenticity’. Yet, emotional universality can easily co-exist across cultural and linguistic differences. They showed success is no longer one directional (from America or ‘the West’ outwards). Knowing that their audience is really a global one, Netflix has expanded its subtitles and dubbing to over thirty languages to further ‘localise’ its content.
Moreover, Hollywood itself has been internationalising itself. One shouldn’t take the awards scene as gospel, but they are still indicative of the evolution. Amit Chaudhuri wrote in 2006 that “Hollywood’s response to globalisation has been to close ranks artistically, to become determinedly simpler, more suburban, more white.” Maybe he was right then, maybe he was wrong. One thing that is clear is that an effort has been made to make this less the case now.
I remember the online frenzy that was #OscarsSoWhite because of all twenty acting nominees of the Oscars were all white consecutively in 2015 and 2016. Ah, the mid-2010s. Those were the days when the nostrums of progressive identity politics – “representation”, “inclusion” – were the rage. In the decade since, the Academy consciously diversified its voting body to make it more international than ever, and there have been more non-white nominees and winners than ever before.
Of course, non-English language films have been nominated at the Oscars – La Grande Illusion was the first one in 1938. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s films by Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini and the like were nominated. It’s just that they were rarely nominated for Best Picture. Some of them won honorary Oscars as compensation – the Academy’s way of signalling that they weren’t totally ignoring them.
This is why Parasite winning Best Picture in 2020, the first non-English language film to do so, was very symbolic. It showed that a film that is deeply rooted in a country’s culture, especially a non-Anglophone, non-European one, could nonetheless attain global acclaim. Since then, non-English language films have been nominated for Best Picture for seven consecutive years and not simply contained in the Best Foreign Language Film award. RRR won best Original Song at the last Oscars. In 2024 and 2025 two international films were in the Best Picture nomination. Furthermore, there is a narrative (being pushed by Neon and awards season media outlets in general) to get three international movies for the first time. YouTube recently winning exclusive rights to stream the Oscars should be seen as part of the Academy’s strategy to cultivate a more international audience.
All this potentially foreshadows a global film landscape that is more interdependent, yet gradually more multiplex. Streaming will further accelerate the diversification and nicheification of people’s tastes, as they’ll have more direct films from all around the world, as, in Tyler Cowen’s phrase, “difference has been liberated from space”. Bollywood, Korean cinema and Japanese anime will further bolster their regional and even global imprint. Hollywood’s unipolarity will end. Hollywood films will face stiff competition from local films within the global box office it so depends on. It will less be the global default, the North star, but one important node among other growing nodes in the global film ecosystem, where Hollywood is primus inter pares not unipolar; prominent but not supreme.
So, don’t take these developments as meaning Hollywood will collapse or decline into oblivion. That would be hyperbolic. Hollywood still has the ability to appeal to Western and non-Western audiences across the world in a way no other film industry can. Universal story telling that travel well across nations is built into its system; English being the global lingua franca is still a major advantage. Hollywood still has technical advantage and economies of scale in production and distribution and it can still hoover up and assimilate talent all over the world onto itself, making it feel less ‘local’ to America, but put forward the pretension that it is global. Above all, it is in America, which is still the supreme capitalist power, whose gravitational power is not just economic, but social and cultural, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Hollywood is in a setback, but it can readjust and adapt, and it will. But it will exist in a very different world than what it was once comfortable in.
Cinephiles are mostly cosmopolitan in orientation. We know cinema has been cosmopolitan from its birth, that Hollywood was built by immigrants. We believe that just as there is a Weltliteratur there can also be a Weltkino. Thus, if more countries from the global South, as a result of economic growth, can develop their own mature film industries that can contribute to the conversations within the ecosystem of world cinema, that’s more to the good. Every nation has something to contribute. This isn’t an effect of nationalist nonsense like ‘decoloniality’ or the ‘subaltern speaking back’. It is a straightforward effect of commercial society and liberal internationalism; that the peoples of the world can peaceably culturally exchange with each other. We’re on the edge of a fundamental restructuring of the global film landscape. One that will have all sorts of consequences (a lot of slop will likely be churned out by these platforms), but has potential too (new waves and renaissances in many countries). For that, cinephiles have a lot to look forward to and trepidant about.
