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You don't need to "compete with Disney"; and quite honestly I consider that to be a bad way to think about the production of creative works. If you think about production that way, then it just becomes a budget measuring game, and everyone in the industry winds up producing largely similar mass-market works. Producers like doing this because it boils down the complex process of actually making a movie, book, or game down into whoever is the best capitalist. The problem is that the people who are here for just Disney are just going to buy Disney, and ignore whatever competing product you churn out. The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't). In the case of streaming services, many of the countries I mentioned before actually condition local market access on having a certain percentage of original works produced in that country. This is why Netflix has a lot of foreign-language originals; they need to meet that national production quota and the easiest way to do that is to just fund a lot of lower-budget productions.[0] Of course, these kinds of laws also put Hacker News into apoplectic fits, and it's also the same bullshit China pulls to get cultural influence in Hollywood; so I'm not going to try and sing their virtues too much. Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish. Cultivating your own literary culture makes it more likely that some of those works will find international success[2], because the kinds of people who read lots of books or watch lots of movies are suckers for novelty. [0] My current impression, which may be wrong, is that this is how we got Squid Game. [1] Related note: France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome. [2] ex. Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher. |
I'd say that it depends. I think some cultures seem to have their own creative thing going on that resists the homogenizing effect of American movies and TV[0]. Those cultures don't need to compete with Hollywood. Others might, and that's probably not a winning strategy.
> If you think about production that way, then it just becomes a budget measuring game, and everyone in the industry winds up producing largely similar mass-market works.
This is a pretty common complaint about current media in the US though. So maybe that's already happening?
> The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't).
Oh yes, this was entirely my point. Bollywood, Russian literature, and Manga were three examples I picked out at random. It seems like some cultures produce identifiable examples of this, and others do not. But that might also be more a consequence of which ones I've observed, rather than the cultures themselves.
> Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish.
Agreed! Although I suspect that anglohostility is probably a helpful trait if your goal is to resist the encroachment of English. Although that's probably not strictly necessary; my understanding is that anglohostility is characteristic of the French literary scene and not say, Manga. But I could be wrong. I don't think cultural purity laws work.
But the question is, does Sweden have a lot of novels writing only in Swedish in order to preserve and foster Swedish culture and language? Or are they getting swamped with external stuff? I genuinely don't know.
> France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.
That seems to be the near universal assessment of the France, which is entertaining to me.
> Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.
Much to the Poles annoyance, I'm sure. The relatively low rate of breakthroughs of non-English works into American culture is interesting though. I'm not sure if that speaks more to Polish literature (in this case) or American media culture.
0 - The funny thing is that the Soviets regularly accused America of being a cultural desert compared to the USSR. It's kind of hard to square the argument that capitalism doesn't produce a lot of (or good) culture with the complaint that Hollywood is part of US soft power doctrine.