Hollywood Film in the Global Market

When people read the word "film," more often than not their minds will jump immediately to Hollywood. American cinema is the most well known in the world with it’s films frequently topping the global box office worth upwards of $40 billion in 2019, which would be even higher today if not for COVID-19 (Investopedia). Because of Hollywood’s massive global reach, some movie-goers may not even realize how many movies are being made elsewhere in the world, or in the foreign market. This begs the question: why aren’t we seeing a wider array of movies from different parts of the world?

There are a myriad of reasons why Hollywood dominates the global film market and marketing plays a huge role. Firstly, Hollywood is the world’s oldest national film industry, with it’s first film being completed in 1908 (history.com). As such, Hollywood has had time to establish itself in the global market far before other, more recent and still growing, film industries. Essentially, Hollywood was a perfect monopoly, split into multiple different studios that compete with each other while all simultaneously dominating the global film market. Hollywood is no longer the only film industry in the world, however, and multiple countries such as India, South Korea, and Iran are seeing massive success and growth within their respective industries. South Korea, specifically, has really stared to give Hollywood a run for it’s money.

Speaking of money, Hollywood has a whole lot of it. This is the next and main reason why Hollywood continues to be the dominating force in the global film market. Hollywood studios have the resources to throw ludicrous amounts of money at their films, in fact, $100 million is the average (Investopedia)! With such high budgets, the marketing team can have a massive global reach. They can hire people from around the world to develop geographic segmentation strategies to tailor advertisements to different regions. China, for example, is the biggest box office market in the world and extremely valuable to Hollywood’s success, so they will create different advertisements and sometimes different cuts of movies to appeal to their cultural values.

While it is true that anyone can pick up a camera and make a film, that doesn’t mean that their vision will be shared with hundreds of millions of people. Hollywood has been at the top of the food chain in the global film market for over a hundred years and will likely stay there long into the future. However, tat doesn’t mean filmmakers from around the world will cease to innovate and grow their own domestic industries, Word of mouth is the greatest marketing of all, and the more film industries we talk about, the more unique visions we will all be able to enjoy.