Many in Hollywood think that tastes shifted after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.
"Anything with a US bent won't get made," said Bill Mechanic, who worked at both Disney and Fox. Added the producer Graham King, who bought the overseas rights to Gangs of New York for US$65 million: "Since 9/11 there has been a definite change and the genres have opened up."
Two of those genres are the family film and the old-style epic, both blissfully free of modern politics. China, for instance, where the government imposes strict standards on foreign imports, is interested in movies which are apolitical, family driven and not particularly violent, King said.
Studio executives say that movies are also being released far more quickly overseas, chiefly out of fear that pirated copies of movies will be selling on street corners before the movies hit theaters and because of the increasingly saturated market for entertainment news fueled by the Internet.
"Information is traveling faster and the international audience is now more aware of event films in the US," said Veronika Kwan-Rubinek, president of international distribution for Warner Brothers.
Some industry analysts suggest that Warner Brothers released the second and third installment of The Matrix worldwide in part to circumvent bad publicity about the films and earn as much money as possible in the film's opening weekends. (Warner executives deny this.)
But studios have taken such an approach before. In 1997, Sony Pictures Entertainment released Devil's Own starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford, but the studio feared it would tank after it received poor reviews. Sony, a division of the Sony Corporation, decided on a worldwide release, according to Jeff Blake, a vice chairman at Sony, who said the studio was betting on foreign audiences' interest in the two stars, not the plot. The strategy worked; the movie earned US$43 million in the US and US$100 million internationally.
Studios, too, are expanding overseas to take advantage of the worldwide audience. In fact, Twentieth Century Fox plans to open a distribution office in Russia in six months, according to Peter Chernin, the president of the News Corporation, which owns the studio.
Last year, Warner Brothers International Cinemas opened a nine-screen multiplex theater in Shanghai.
But not everyone agrees that global releases are a path to quick profits. "It's gotten ridiculous," said Rolf Mittweg, an executive at New Line Cinema, which released the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Mittweg prefers a more staggered approach, which means picking the best dates, as each territory has its own peculiarities. In particular, he pointed to the opening of the global-warming disaster film The Day After Tomorrow in 110 territories.
"Most people open in 58 markets. They are boasting. It's not healthy for the business. These movies are killing each other off. Unless you have a film that can stand on its own, a real event, it is better to pick the best dates."
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