Last weekend, film fans in 39 countries spent $185m watching Avengers Assemble: a superheroic start to blockbuster season. But one nation was conspicuously missing from the list: the US. Captain America was embraced by Swedes and Peruvians before his countrymen had the chance to see the film known simply as The Avengers in the States. It was a similar story for Battleship, an alien attack movie as American as McDonald's apple pie, which dropped anchor in 26 territories on 11 April, five weeks before it will dock on US shores.
Ten years ago, the landscape looked very different. The mission to combat piracy led to simultaneous global rollouts – "day and date" releases, in Hollywood lingo – and that was the policy picked for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones back in 2002. But "America first" was still the industry standard. That summer, Spider-Man arrived in UK cinemas six weeks after US release, Men in Black II four weeks after, and Minority Report two weeks after. The Sum of All Fears took nearly two months to wash up in Europe. Billing a film as "the No 1 US hit" was a classic marketing strategy; pictures that flopped at home could have their overseas budgets slashed … or be dumped.
This year, sport fogs the picture; not just the Olympics, but Euro 2012, which kicks off on 8 June. Twentieth Century Fox has scheduled Prometheus to arrive in US cinemas on that exact date, but will release Ridley Scott's film the week before in 17 other countries, including the UK. Yet footie has nothing to do with the studio's strategy on Ice Age: Continental Drift, which starts its international run on 27 June, more than a fortnight before it appears in US cinemas. Why? Well: the last Ice Age movie, Dawn of the Dinosaurs, took $197m in the US and $691m elsewhere. Domestic US box-office used to be the focus of Hollywood studios; but now international has overtaken, particularly for tentpole movies. Those foreign markets are surging upwards, particularly in Brazil, Russia, India and China, but also in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Last year, the latest Transfomers movie took $172m in China alone, nearly half its US tally. Avatar-alike John Carter (budget: $250m) has been widely reported as a pricey flop – but it would have been a lot worse had overseas not added $200m to the $69m US take.
Big shifts have been triggered on the ground, too, with several Hollywood studios getting seriously involved in local productions. Fox, for one, is producing films in Germany, Japan, Korea, India and Brazil, primarily for native consumption.
But some things never change: despite James Bond and Harry Potter, most of the major studios' output remains culturally, if not physically, rooted in the States. That's certainly true of this month's big movies: American Pie: Reunion, Dark Shadows, The Dictator, Men in Black III and What To Expect When You're Expecting. Sure, casting Brits in American superhero roles such as Batman (Christian Bale), Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) and Superman (Henry Cavill) is a nice compliment. But we'll know there has been a real attitude adjustment when actors are encouraged to use their natural accents in stories that never set foot on US soil.
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