Some time ago, while working on nineteenth-century literary markets, I was struck by how thoroughly British and French novels managed to streamline European cultural consumption: hundreds of thousands of people reading more or less the same books, and at the same time. This looked so much like the beginning of the culture industry that it suggested a little follow-up experiment—on film markets, this time. I began with the records published in Variety, and listed the 5 most successful American films for every year between 1986 and 1995; then I turned to non-American markets, in order to assess the extent of Hollywood’s planetary diffusion. Here, the sources (Variety International, Screen International, and various related yearbooks) turned out to be extremely patchy, and I decided to map only those countries for which at least two years were fully documented; this made the sample a little more reliable, but unfortunately much more unbalanced: of 46 countries with ‘enough’ data, 25 are in Europe; Africa is almost entirely absent, as are many Asian and Latin American countries, and the demographic giants of India, China and Russia.

Big blanks. Since, however, some interesting patterns emerge, I am writing these pages anyway. Take them for what they are: initial hypo­theses that should be tested against a larger, more precise set of data.

Figure 1: the sheer power of Hollywood. In 24 countries (the black triangles), American films make up between 75 and 90 per cent of the decade’s top hits; in another 13 (the black stars) the percentage climbs above 90; in 5 cases it reaches 100. (While spending a year in Berlin, every now and then I checked the top ten hits of the week; always at least 9 American films, if not 10.) ‘When one talks of cinema’, wrote the Brazilian avant-garde director Glauber Rocha in the 1960s, ‘one talks of American cinema . . . Every discussion of cinema made outside Hollywood must begin with Hollywood’. Indeed.

But first, a few words on those nations (the white circles) where Hollywood encounters an obstacle, and falls below 75 per cent of box-office hits. Sweden and Denmark are the core nations of Scandinavia: an area, as a dissertation by Leyvoy Joensen has shown, with a very strong regional identity, where not just Danish or Swedish novels, but Icelandic and Faroese ones had quite a criss-cross circulation. As for the Czech Republic, Serbia and Bulgaria, they are the tip of the—melting—East European iceberg: in the Czech Republic, American films accounted for less than 30 per cent of box-office hits before 1989; afterwards, they reached 76 per cent. And the same trend is visible in Slovakia and Poland (and Estonia, Romania, Slovenia: but their data were too erratic, so they don’t appear in the map).

Then, France. Where the story is different; Paris was the Hollywood of the nineteenth century, its novels were read and imitated everywhere—they even invented cinema there! No wonder they hate the other Hollywood, no one likes to give up symbolic hegemony; but no one keeps it by mere force of will either, and although France knows how to protect its own market (which was twice inundated by foreign films, in the 1920s and 1940s, and twice bounced back), there is no question of its competing with Hollywood abroad. Between 1986 and 1995, only four non-American films enjoyed a large international success: A Fish called Wanda, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Crocodile Dundee, The Last Emperor: two British comedies, an Australian comedy, an American–Italian melodrama. None of them was French. In fact, none was any different from the usual Hollywood fare . . .

Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, France: all ‘residual’ sub-systems, that don’t threaten Hollywood’s hegemony. The true rival is in Asia: Hong Kong. (As I already said, I could not find enough data for the other obvious candidate, India.) In the sample decade, only Jurassic Park and Speed made it into the Hong Kong list; all other hits were local products. And Hong Kong has also its regional sphere of influence: Malaysia, Taiwan, partly Thailand, probably Pakistan and Bangladesh and China (whose insufficient data don’t appear in the map).

Of course, the future of the Hong Kong film industry is not clear: it may be stunted by the incorporation into the People’s Republic of China—or the exact opposite: the larger market may be a boost to production and inventiveness. Be that as it may, in the last generation or so (from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan and beyond) Hong Kong films have very efficiently caught the wake of Hollywood’s greatest export staple: the films of action and adventure charted in Figure 2.footnote¹ With its many fuzzy internal divisions, but quite clear external borders, this is by far the most successful form both inside the US and abroad (with the exception of Europe, about which more later). South and East Asia are these films’ favourite destination: they account for 50 per cent of the decade’s hits in Singapore, 55 in South Korea, 65 in Indonesia, 67 in Taiwan and Thailand, 80 in Malaysia (and the sporadic data for Pakistan, India and Bangladesh confirm this pattern).