Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
I was in a low-key New York bar on Seventh Avenue in the mid-80s when I became aware of the steely eyes of American playwright and actor Sam Shepard—who didn’t know me from Adam—watching me buy a drink. I was stuffing the change into my wallet when he slapped a hand on my arm.
“Not like that,” he said. “Like this.” He took the cash back out and placed it on the bar. “That way your barman can dip in whenever you want another.”
It was a small but memorable lesson in trust from someone best known for reshaping deeply American myths—of family, masculinity, the West and success—into edgy psychological drama.
Maybe Mr Shepard’s influence was already at work: I would soon write an Off-Broadway play myself. Though the fact that he’d played Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff may have been the real bourbon in the birthday punch.
Today, the relationship between the rest of the world and Hollywood is more complicated. Hollywood flourished in the postwar decades not just because of the films it made, but because of the momentum America projected. To much of the outside world, America meant economic growth, technological ambition, cultural openness and a dizzying sense that the future was being invented there—and nowhere else.
It would be simplistic to suggest that today’s anti-American sentiment explains Hollywood’s recent struggles abroad. Once-dominant Hollywood formulas, including the superhero cycle, no longer command the automatic international enthusiasm they once did—though spectacular exceptions remain.
Meanwhile, non-American entertainment industries and traditions are finding increasingly global audiences—from Chinese cinema and Squid Game to RRR and Japanese anime franchises.
Audiences are increasingly embracing stories rooted in local and regional cultures, and no longer need Hollywood to serve as the centre of their popular culture.
In some pockets of the Middle East and Latin America, anti-American sentiment has also evolved into subtler forms of cultural distancing—not necessarily organised boycotts, but a waning appetite for American visions of male heroism and moral authority.
Recently, I was eating fish and chips with a Buddhist on a boat on the River Thames. We were moored opposite the London Eye, between Westminster and Embankment. As we watched the river darken, my companion said: “You know, with everything going on in America right now, I’m not so sure I want to sit through another American action movie. Not one where they get to save the world.”
I remember feeling saddened that those of us who had once lived so happily in the United States should now find ourselves encountering so many people—even Buddhists—who no longer wished to buy what America was selling, including its films.
If anti-American sentiment becomes more organised, institutional or state-driven, I suspect Hollywood’s influence will weaken further. Markets will close, censors will tighten and quotas will appear. Into the resulting emotional and commercial space will move domestic industries of their own.
That said, Hollywood has sometimes flourished precisely when anti-American sentiment was at its strongest. Countries deeply critical of US foreign policy, military power or cultural dominance have nevertheless consumed enormous quantities of American entertainment.
But perhaps that was partly because a certain kind of film was being made—one that could mirror, and sometimes even embody, those protests. One only has to look back at the Hollywood auteur films of the 1970s to see how powerfully this could work.
Audiences are surely still capable of separating the American government from American popular culture, the White House from Marvel, or drone strikes from Amazon. You can distrust American power while remaining captivated by American storytelling.
But quite apart from all this, the streaming era has also weakened Hollywood’s lustre abroad. Platforms such as Netflix discovered that becoming truly global increasingly meant producing locally. Audiences often prefer stories rooted in their own languages and cultures—and some of those stories, in turn, can travel the world.
By 2025, 52 per cent of Netflix’s original TV season releases were in languages other than English. I encountered the same logic while researching a Kazakh drama about nuclear non-proliferation. It all chips away at the old assumption that American stories somehow travel better than anyone else’s.
There is a wonderful irony here. Some of the machinery now weakening Hollywood’s cultural monopoly is itself American. Netflix helped create a global distribution system in which Seoul, Mumbai, Tokyo or Madrid no longer needed to pass through Los Angeles to reach the world.
Japanese anime is now watched by more than half of Netflix members worldwide. Indian films have appeared in its Global Top 10 every week since the beginning of 2024. The world’s willingness to lose itself in American stories may be fading, but its appetite for stories has not.
Yet inside the machinery of so-called Hollywood power, the appetite for myth-making is less straightforward than outsiders might imagine. I remember one baking-hot afternoon in 2008 at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, southeast of Charikar.
I’d spent the day filming a de-mining team in oppressive heat and dust. At one point we came across a shoe from a blown-off foot. Later, over pizza at an actual Pizza Hut on the base—subsequently closed—everyone started talking about movies. This was the year of The Hurt Locker, years before Land of Mine offered its own, arguably more morally exhausted, vision of war.
Yet what stayed with me was the talk of General McChrystal—soon to take command of NATO forces in the country—counting Lassie among his favourite films, as though hard power might secretly crave gentleness.
Or perhaps his StratCom team had simply taken the scenic route to insanity.
None of this amounts to a global boycott of Hollywood. But countries such as France, South Korea and China have long used quotas and other protections to shield their domestic film industries from the titanic pull of American cinema.
Often, such protectionism was itself an acknowledgement of Hollywood’s extraordinary power. It belonged to the same imaginative world as the popular myth of Khrushchev looking down from his plane at the countless swimming pools of Los Angeles and declaring: “Now I know that Communism has failed.”
Talking of which, China offers perhaps the clearest contemporary example of how quickly the balance can shift. For years, Hollywood blockbusters dominated Chinese multiplexes. More recently, Beijing has increasingly prioritised its own film industry.
By 2025, domestic films accounted for almost 80 per cent of China’s box office. Most strikingly, the Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2, drawing on the country’s own mythology, grossed roughly $2.2 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of the year.
It is difficult to imagine a neater reversal of the old cultural traffic than a story drawn from Chinese mythology sitting at the summit of the global box office.
Yet China also demonstrates why this is not simply a story of Hollywood retreat. Zootopia 2 became an enormous hit there, setting records for an imported animated film. Chinese audiences had not suddenly lost the capacity to be seduced by Hollywood. What Hollywood had lost was the presumption that it would automatically do the seducing.
Perhaps it is only natural that a country growing more confident in its own stories becomes less willing to squat inside somebody else’s.
Russia after 2022 offers a starker example of political conflict reshaping the circulation of American films. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, major Hollywood studios—including Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony and Paramount—suspended theatrical releases in the country.
Blockbusters that would ordinarily have received wide releases—such as The Batman, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Avatar: The Way of Water—disappeared from Russia’s official cinema market.
The result was not merely the withdrawal of individual titles but the abrupt removal of Hollywood from one of its largest official theatrical markets, demonstrating how quickly geopolitical conflict can disrupt even seemingly established patterns of global circulation.
Yet don’t the studios, in the end, simply adjust—politically and aesthetically—to the tastes and sensitivities of the wider world? Doesn’t overt nationalism get softened when necessary? Aren’t controversial themes diluted, or avoided altogether, when the market demands it?
Don’t scripts increasingly get shaped with foreign censors and markets in mind? And hasn’t this always been, at heart, a pretty ruthless and cynical business? International casts, too, can broaden a film’s appeal while softening its sense of American exclusivity.
It is remarkable to consider how many people around the world once learned how Americans dreamed before they ever met an American in person.
Every Friday, when I was studying in the old Etruscan walled city of Perugia, the locals would finish work and promenade up and down Corso Vannucci, arm in arm and often in their finest. Shortly after the release of Saturday Night Fever, young Italian men began imitating John Travolta on these weekly parades, wearing polyester glamour suits, loudly patterned disco shirts—collars capable of poking your eye out—and garish platform heels.
Some even appeared in white three-piece Tony Manero suits, in direct homage to their latest Italo-American hero. While some Italians still had 1900 posters on their walls, others had become captivated by something more immediate and performative. It was like watching American “cool” pushed to ridiculous extremes.
This makes it all the sadder that rising anti-American feeling should coincide with a weakening of American soft power, particularly among younger audiences with cultural alternatives their parents could scarcely have imagined. The world no longer relies on Hollywood to gift it modernity, glamour, rebellion or escape.
I was sitting in the large auditorium of a Leicester Square cinema in 1980, waiting for the lights to dim. I was freshly down from Scotland. That evening, Peter Sellers’ death had been announced and, by coincidence, I was there to see Being There.
As the credits rolled, the audience rose to its feet and applauded. It felt oddly American, as though the cinema itself had become Hollywood territory. The applause went on. It was all very un-English. Sellers was not there.
American cinema, like its streaming platforms, remains technically dominant. Sustained hostility, however, can erode cultural affection—just as Hollywood’s extraordinary reach has sometimes provoked resistance in the first place.
Yet something larger than hostility is happening. Through film, America taught much of the modern world how to dream. But it also helped create the global cultural machinery through which everybody else could export dreams of their own.
The world has not stopped dreaming. It has simply acquired more places to dream from. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” Norma Desmond famously insists in Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps Hollywood’s question now is almost the reverse. The pictures have grown larger, more numerous and more global. Can America remain the dream the world chooses when it no longer gets to dream alone?
