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2/19/2025

Ya'know whats interesting? The stranglehold that the United States has on the film industry. Rarely do any foreign films wind up top grossing. The current top 50 highest grossing movies of all time consist entirely of English language movies with some ties to the US film industry. Well that was true until recently. A good friend of mine alerted me to a Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2. It's not only the highest grossing animated movie of all time but it is also the 8th highest grossing movie of all time. In my experiance, this is unheard of. Obviously, this is due in part to the absolutly MASSIVE chunk of the world's population living in China, but Ne Zha 2 is not the first film to be made in China. This is significant

I'd like to go into why I think this movie has been such a crazy success, but I haven't seen it yet. I have made plans to see it this weekend so I'll probably have somthing to say on my post on Monday, but for now I just wanted to highlight the fact that it is so weird that the United States has such a command over the film industry. Historically, it obviously makes sense. Innovations in film technology and technique have, for various reasons, predominantly occurred in France and the USA, and well the US is much larger, richer, and more diverse than France so the industry is naturally going to be more vibrent here. In fact very few other countries have even managed to have a robust film industry because it's so damn expensive. Probably apart from videogames, film might be the most expensive artistic medium to work in. Not only are the materials expensive, but a crew is usually necessary and people tend to work best when they're fed, and paid. Then, of course, the really popular films need a collaboration of diverse artistic disiplines from writing, to animation, to painting, to make up, to costuming, to sculpture ad infinitum. So naturally only the largest concentrations of wealth have the ability to support a film industry. It's really not surprising then that as the US is going through somthing of a rough patch right now, China's film industry can get somthing of an international foothold.

Please take everything I've said above with a grain of salt. It's all based on what I remember from my film studies degree and general knowledge about the relative wealth of the countries discussed. I did no real research into the economics of all this. It does feel right to me.