Whatever happened to the American blockbuster?

It used to be that a film set in the US with strong American themes was a box-office winner. Now it's the culturally neutral backdrops that are cornering the global market.

"American" was an evocative word for a movie title as recently as 1999, when American Beauty and American Pie were riding high at the global box office. It indicated supremacy, with a hint of kitsch. But something was about to happen to films about America. You could glimpse it in the worldwide top five that year: Tarzan, The Matrix, Toy Story 2, The Sixth Sense and the dreaded Phantom Menace. Three movies unfolding on American soil, one in the African rainforest, the last in a galaxy far, far away.

Of the US-set films, which were Yankee to the bone? Toy Story, yes, but merchandise boy Buzz Lightyear pointed the route away from the rough textures of Americana towards the sterile corporate lobbies and digital anywhere-cities of The Matrix. Which really left M Night Shyamalan's debut as the only unabashed, old-school, all-American film.

We could have used a warning from the future about Shyamalan, but who knew one might be needed about the demise of the American blockbuster? The USA of the collective unconscious – LA storm drains, NYC fire escapes, Midwest horizon roads and speedboat-parted Florida wetlands – is almost extinct at the global box office. Last year's top five had one film, the fourth Twilight, with a US setting; two, if you count the last Transformers, which really belongs to the multimillion-dollar globetrotters that rule the roost now. The new orthodoxy is: if a film is set in America, with strong American themes, the less chance it stands in the new globalised mainstream. What's happened over the last 20 years becomes obvious if you take a scan at the top five for 1990: Ghost, Home Alone, Pretty Woman, Dances with Wolves, Total Recall. All as American (well, and a bit Martian) as George Bush Sr's ringtone.

What's slowly driving out all-American blockbusters are films with culturally neutral backdrops that travel better: exotic animations such as Ice Age and Madagascar, mythological epics like Immortals, and science-fiction. American films are almost becoming ghettoised in the "local film" bracket. The Help, like The Blind Side a couple of years before it, has been swinging for the global consciousness, but in vain: it did 83% of its business in the US. A couple of decades ago, The Grey would have been a high-performing genre pic, the kind of thing that might scrape into the worldwide top 20; no chance. True Grit was the hardest-riding straight western for years, but even the Coens' name couldn't get it any further up than number 30 in the international charts. But the western is the most American of all genres.

Edited from: the guardian