Hollywood Inc., Latin America

Magazine cover girl Salma Hayek

 Looking at the WorldwideBoxOffice.com ranking of all-time movie box office receipts, it is clear that the global film market is dominated by products made in Hollywood, USA.  Why are Hollywood products so popular?  In his book,  Scott Robert Olson proposes "the United States' competitive advantage in the creation and global distribution of popular taste is due to a unique mix of cultural conditions that are conducive to the creation of "transparent" texts --- narratives whose inherent polysemy encourage diverse populations to read them as though they are indigenous ... these narratives have meaning to so many different cultures because they allow viewers in those cultures to project their own values, archetypes, and tropes into the movie or television program, thus enabling the import to function as though it were an indigenous product."

For the all-time box office leader Titanic (1997), now approaching the US$2 billion mark (and larger than the annual Gross National Products of many countries in the world), Olson lists how different people in the world viewed the same movie:

• Japanese audiences reported an attraction of the cultural virtue of gamen -- the ability to remain stoic in the face of adversity --- that they saw in the film.
• Russian audiences were taken with grief at the sad ending, such that a national contest was devised for people to write a new, happy ending
• French cultural elites saw their own political consicousness reflected in the film
• Titanic reminded Turkish audiences of their indigenous film Bandit
• The Brazilian soap opera "Por Amor" incorporated scenes from Titanic.  

Another competitive advantage that accrues to Hollywood is that the large US domestic market (population: 260 million plus) supports a number of huge multimedia corporations that can turn out a large number of big-budget movies that are marketed through numerous distribution channels (cinema houses, video rentals, pay-per-view/premium/regular cable television, broadcast television, video tape/DVD rental/purchases, licensing, merchandising, etc).  No other country in the world can match the Hollywood cultural machine today.  One of the major consequences of Hollywood domination is that many national film industries are overwhelmed by this competition, with the only chance of survival being placed on life-support with small amounts of government funding.

But while the external presence of Hollywood imports is a factor in the endangerment of the national film industries, the real factor is the preferences of movie goers.  The situation reflects the fact that movie goers prefer the Hollywood product over their national ones.  Here, we will cite some data from the TGI Latina study, which is a survey of persons between the ages of 12 and 64 years old in seven Latin American countries.   At the outset, we restrict our base of investigation to people who stated that they had been in a cinema in the previous 6 months.  This is the core group of people who account for most of the movie box receipts.  These people were asked movies from which countries appealed to them (note: they were offered a choice among Hollywood movies, movies from their own country, movies from other Latin American movies and European movies).  Among these people, 77% of them said that they prefer movies from Hollywood.

Movie posters of Maria Felix

The next table shows the demographic analyses of the preference to movies from Hollywood.  We make the following points:

• The preference for Hollywood movies is slightly higher in the southern cone, and is lowest in Mexico.  Of course, the Mexican film industry was once a vibrant force and, in its golden age in the 1940's and 1950's, routinely churned out more than 100 domestic productions per year.  Today, fewer than ten Mexican films are produced each year.  Nevertheless, the vintage Mexican films continue to be popular among the older, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of the Mexican cable television channels such as Golden Choice Cinema and Corte Latino.
• The preference is slightly higher among teenagers and young males, and lowest among person 55 to 64 years old.  This generational rupture would reflect that at some point, a new generation of movie-goers had disconnected from the national productions.  The fact that there once used to be a vibrant national industry in Mexico, and the fact that there are thriving national industries elsewhere (such as Bollywood in Bombay, India) mean that it is not an impossible task to develop a national film industry, but the first order of the task is to find a way of connecting with the consumers. 
• The preference is a decreasing function of socio-economic level.
• The preference is a decreasing function of the ability to comprehend spoken English.  This gets back to the question of whether English-language movies should be dubbed or sub-titled (or both) in foreign countries.  A sub-titled movie would be better appreciated by someone who can understand the source language.  In fact, there are people who say that they learned their English through attending movies.

(source: TGI Latina)

Relative to Hollywood, how do movies from other places fare?  Here are the other preferences:

• 13% for movies from the respondent's own country
• 4% for movies from other Latin American countries
• 11% for movies from Europe

(Technical note:  Respondents can choose more than one country of origin).  Obviously, one cannot state a preference for movies from one's own country unless there are movies being locally produced or at least minimally a large national film library.  So it is that the 13% preference stated for one's own country is in fact dominated by a 32% preference in Argentina over much lower numbers elsewhere.

REFERENCES

• Zona Latina's Latin American Cinema links

(posted by Roland Soong on 12/26/00)

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