Anti-US Fervor in Hollywood

With massive popular uprisings sweeping many of the most politically-repressed nations of the world, Americans are looking toward the upcoming weekend with a mixture of both fear and dread because it’s time, once again, for the annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards ceremony to be televised.

The primary reason for that is because the Academy Awards ceremony has increasingly become an unbearably abysmal viewing experience over the past decades, as Hollywood feels compelled to produce a spectacle that, well, is doomed to flop, even by our much lower critical standards for award shows.

But another reason why is because of the anti-American political bias of many of the movie stars, producers and directors whose achievements in 2010 will be celebrated this Sunday evening, 27 February 2011, beginning live at 5:00 PM Eastern Time on the ABC television network with hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Because nothing makes for more a more dreadful viewing experience than some highly talented movie stars seeking to exploit the worldwide platform they’ve been given to show off how much they care about the ongoing tragedy of “fill-in-the-blank,” which could be fixed if only Americans cared as much as the movie stars did and demonstrate by their willingness to go far over the allotted time they’ve been given for accepting their award. Assuming they get through thanking the laundry list of people who worked on their movie that pretty much only they know….

But then we wondered whether Hollywood has a financial motive for being so apparently anti-American? We’ve previously found that anti-U.S. movies tend to flop badly at the U.S. box office, but what about overseas film markets? How do those anti-U.S. movies do in those foreign box offices?

We decided to find out! We went back and identified the most anti-U.S. movies that Hollywood has produced in recent years to see how they did in both their domestic U.S. market and in foreign theaters. We then narrowed our selection to consider only movies set in contemporary times, the issues related to which foreign audiences would most closely recognize and to which they would presumably be most receptive to sitting through a 90 minute long anti-U.S. screed.

The obvious candidates then turned out to be the anti-”War on Terror” movies that have been produced since 2006. The chart below shows how these movies performed and the domestic U.S. and foreign box office, which we then compared with each movie’s estimated production costs.

What we find is that in all but one case, the 2009 Best Picture-winning Hurt Locker, none of the films presented in our chart above earned back their production costs from their U.S. box office receipts. Meanwhile, only two films earned more in the U.S. than they did overseas: Stop Loss, a critically-praised but audience-hated movie that was only released in a dozen countries, limiting its foreign earning potential and The Kingdom, the most politically-neutral of all the films we identified, which perhaps explains its success at the U.S. box office.

Overall, the combined box office take from domestic and foreign box offices was enough for four of the nine films to make back their production costs and for another two films to nearly do so.

Omitting The Kingdom as a control sample, given its political neutrality, we find that the remaining eight anti-U.S. films earned a combined U.S. and foreign total of $276,391,622, with $94,620,951 (34.2%) coming from the U.S. box office and the remaining $181,770,671 (65.8%) from outside the U.S. In simple terms, Hollywood earns roughly two dollars overseas for every one it makes in the U.S. for these anti-U.S. movies.

The combined total of the estimated production costs for these eight films is $243,292,000. With the total box office take of these movies being $276,391,622, we find that Hollywood did indeed make a profit on these films, earning $33,099,622, or just shy of a 12% profit margin when compared to their estimated production costs.

It seems that Hollywood does indeed has a pretty large financial incentive for being so anti-American. Who knew that good old-fashioned greed could help explain Hollywood’s political posturing?

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