Competing with Hollywood: competitive, defensive and grass-roots strategies

Three examples of film industries (Japan, China and Nigeria) that compete with Hollywood in a domestic capacity.

Author: Barnaby Falck (@barnabyfalck1)

Copyrights: "Hollywood Sign" by Fat Elvis Records is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse.

Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America (US) has often been viewed as the cultural hegemon of the world – a state which has dominated popular culture around the globe in terms of economic power and sheer “reach” unlike any other state that has come before. From cinema to music, video games to books, the US has an almost unquestioned monopoly on world culture.

The main reason for this hegemonic success is varied and nuanced, but essentially it comes down to the United States’ raw economic power combined with a world system of free-market capitalism incentivising states all over the world to let in the flow of lavishly produced American cultural “goods”.

However, there have been exceptions to this almost “all powerful” soft power success. Some countries have managed to maintain control over their own national cultural out-puts. We will look at how three different countries have tried different approaches that have successfully competed and combated the US’ raw cultural impact. However, to limit the scope of this article we will focus on visual culture exclusively (TV and film). The three approaches covered are: -Competitive -Defensive -Grassroots

Competitive: Japan

In general terms, one country that has had an almost equal reach in terms of cultural impact on the world has been Japan. The most obvious example to think of is the Video Game Industry, however the Japanese film industry also perfectly shows off Japan’s methods of competing with the US in terms of soft power.

Japan, following the Second World War was a country that had to rebuild itself almost completely, not only in terms of economy and infrastructure, but also culturally (Alt, 2021). This cultural renaissance was heavily influenced by US imports, particularly cartoons, which saw the slow but steady rise of the “anime” industry.

While initially only really being a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, the late 1980’s and early 1990’s saw the “birth” of the modern anime industry with the release of seminal feature films, like Akira (Otomo, 1988), and the spread of serialized shows like Dragon Ball Z (Koyama, 1989-1996), both of which became massive hits world-wide, but most importantly, they both became massive hits in the US (Stuckman, 2018). While initially a nice interest amongst fans of Japanese culture, many of those who spent their youth watching anime in the US would go on to create block-buster hits that would be heavily inspired by anime. These block-busters include game-changing films such as The Matrix franchise (Wachowski Sisters) and Requiem For a Dream (Aronofsky, 2001), just to name a few. This would in tern generate further mainstream interest in anime, which would then influence more film-makers (Alt, 2021). And so the cycle would continue, with the anime industry only increasing in size and influence throughout the 21st century.

The soft power reach of anime reached its zenith recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the Japanese Film, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (Sotozaki, 2020) become the highest grossing film world-wide in 2020; the first non-US film to do so in the history of the medium (Hoffman, 2021). However, within Japan itself anime films and TV shows constituently out-perform US made films. (Hoffman, 2021) All in all, the anime industry is powerful both in terms of its raw cultural reach, but also in terms of how it manages to compete with US popular cultural at its own game.

Defensive: China

Chinas has the largest cinema going audience in the world, by far with an average number of cinema tickets sold per year numbering around 1.5 billion in the 2010’s (Thomala, 2022). The combination of ease of access to cinema screens and relatively cheap tickets allows hundreds of millions of people to become regular cinema-goers (Thomala, 2022). Many of the highest grossing American films only become so because of the sheer amount of money generated from Chinese audiences (Gross, 2022). However, this success comes with a caveat. While it is true that American films are incredibly popular with Chinese audiences, there are massive limitations placed on the American film industry in China.

First of all there is a limit on how many “non-Chinese” films may be released in China – and this number is very restrictive; it is limited to 34 (Davis, 2022). Secondly, of these 20 films, each of them must demonstrate two things. 1, that it is of economic value to the Chinese market (Davis, 2022), and 2, that it is acceptable to the values of “Chinese Society” (some more suspicious reports believe that this actually means the values expressed by the Communist Party of China (Whalen et al, 2019)). All of this is done with the intent on limiting foreign films and promoting domestically made productions (Yin & Sun, 2021).

It is through these quotas and regulations that the Chinese film industry has become increasingly self-reliant and insular, with recent trends showing that American films are decreasing in popularity (Brzeski, 2022). This suggests that the tactic of limiting access to American films, while also creating increasingly lavish “home-made” productions has worked, and could create a fully insular Chinese film market in years to come.

Grass-Roots: Nigeria

While the US produces the most expensive film in the world that go on to be sent out all across the world, the main “branch” of the US’ film industry, the Californian led “studio” system commonly referred to as “Hollywood” only produces on average about 300-400 films a year, with only a small fraction of these going on to become the world-wide “blockbusters” that dominate the film charts across the world (Aksoy & Robins, 1992).

However, in Nigeria watching films is quite different to how it is in countries situated in the “Global North”. While many in richer countries can afford to go to the cinema regularly, many in Nigeria cannot, with many in the country preferring to consume cheaper, “Nollywood” productions (MasterClass Staff, 2022).

“Nollywood” is the term used to refer to Nigeria’s booming home video market, a market that produces roughly 1000-5000 films per year, every year, making it the largest producer of films in the world (MasterClass Staff, 2022) – (Please note, that this is not including online video production.) These range from films financed by local studios (Akinwotu, 2021), to complete zero budget affairs, put together by passionate local film-makers, similar to the “Do-it-yourself” market of YouTube (Simmonds, 2019). The only different is that these film-makers go on to sell their films into local markets (though many of these films do end up on YouTube in the hopes of gaining some international attention (Simmonds, 2019)).

This massive, home-grown film market manages to dominate Nigerian film going audiences through the simple fact that these films are made locally and sold locally at affordable prices (Akinwotu, 2021). Once these films are bought, they can be screened for many people or viewed from the comfort of home. And the sheer number of films produced every year ensures that at least a small fraction of these films end up selling well enough for ‘Nollywood’ as a whole to beat out US’ produced affairs from dominating the Nigerian box office; a grass roots, practical film industry that ensures that local films take priority over foreign ones.

Conclusion:

These three examples all tell us something about the state of US soft power in the 21st century. The Japanese example shows us that while American popular culture truly reaches into all corners of the world, it is not insular and is heavily influenced by other cultures. The Chinese example shows us that there are limits to how deeply American soft power influence can penetrate into a country. And finally, the Nigerian example shows that there are always alternatives to the mainstream, and these alternatives usually come from local, independent sources.

Bibliography

Akinwotu, Emmanuel. Nollywood Moment: African Film Industries ‘could create 20m jobs’. (The Guardian, 2021)

Aksoy, Asu & Robins, Kevin. Hollywood For the 21st Century: Global Competition For Critical Mass In Image Markets (Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1992).

Alt, Matt. Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. (Penguin Random House, 2021)

Brezeski, Patrick. Does Hollywood Need to Rethink Its China Strategy. (Hollywood Reporter, 2022).

Davis, Rebecca. By The Numbers: Foreign Titles Squeezed in China Film Market. (Variety, 2022)

Gross, Terry. Hollywood Relies on China to Stay Afloat. What does that mean for movies? (Fresh Air, 2022)

Hoffman, Jordan. Demon Slayer: Mugen Train Makes Box Office History. (Vanity Fair, 2021).

MasterClass Staff. Nollywood History: A Look at the Rise of New Nigerian Cinema. (MasterClass Articles, 2022)

Simmonds, Katie. Bigger than Hollywood: The quiet ascent of New Nigerian Cinema. (Canon, 2019)

Stuckman, Chris. Anime Impact: The Movies and Shows that Changed the World of Japanese Animation. (Mango Publishing Group, 2018).

Thomala, Lai Lin. Number of Movie Tickets Sold in China 2010-2021. (Statista, 2022).

Whalen, Jeanne. Golliver, Ben. Zeitchik, Steven. China Lashes out at Western businesses as it tries to cut support for Hong Kong Protests. (The Washington Post, 2019)

Yin, Hong &Sun, Yanbin. Analysis of China’s Film Industry in 2020. (De Gruyter, 2021).