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by dmos62 14 days ago
Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.
6 comments

"Their movies"

Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.

There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.

Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.

Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.

Still US studios who put their money behind projects.

In reality they're just off-shoring costs, but it's still "American".

Even if that's true, the influence is on the decline. It's a combination of factors: fewer and fewer era-defining works and simply novel messages to tell, franchises sucked dry, games and youtube replacing movies.
You can always ruin your advantages. People seem to currently like a lot of US culture and dislike the US (or, it's government at least).
Speak for yourself.
You've not seen Dune?
I have not seen Dune.
Some of us deliberately decide to not consume American blockbuster media.
Less and less though. New-ish Hollywood movies started feeling like a slop before ChatGPT was released with all their endless "Batman vs Pikachu"-likes.
Anecdotally, the people I talk to outside the U.S. see the film industry there as stuck in a Disney/Marvel pattern for the most part. Sure, there are good films, but there's a lot of cynical slop being turned out too and it's become so prevalent that it's a bit of a joke at this point. I blame the stagnation on the extreme consolidation of media companies.