For much of the twentieth century, America’s greatest export wasn’t a product or a military alliance. It was a collection of stories.
Through movies, television, and music, American culture reached people who would never visit the United States, yet still felt they knew it. Hollywood was often at the center of that exchange. Film’s first great advantage was that it didn’t need words to tell a story, but everything changed once Hollywood found its sound.
Silent movies were among the first truly global art forms because they required so little translation. You could watch Charlie Chaplin almost anywhere and understand the story. Grief looks the same in Tokyo as it does in Buenos Aires, and so does a pratfall.
Then, sound arrived. With the release of “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 and each of the “talkies” that followed,
audiences around the world were no longer just watching Hollywood stories; they were hearing a distinctly American voice.
That changed the appeal of Hollywood, and of entertainment as an American export. Audiences around the world were no longer just watching Hollywood stories; they were hearing a distinctly American voice. The characters sounded different, spoke freely, challenged authority casually and carried themselves with a confidence that felt modern. America had long occupied a special place in the world’s imagination as a country where people could reinvent themselves. Sound gave that idea a voice.
America’s entertainment industry also benefited from something few other national cinemas could claim: It was built by people who came from somewhere else. Hollywood reflected the sensibilities of a country shaped by immigrants and their descendants, drawing from different traditions, perspectives, and experiences while blending them into something distinctly American.
That gave its stories a rare quality. They felt unique yet familiar. Audiences around the world could often see some part of themselves in them because, in many ways, those stories had already been shaped by people whose roots stretched far beyond America’s borders. Whether in movies, television or music, American popular culture has long succeeded not simply because it projected America outward, but because it absorbed influences from everywhere and translated them into stories that resonated almost everywhere.
We’ve spent our careers, separately and together, trying to understand why some stories travel and others don’t. We’ve seen audiences respond to the same emotional truths in cities and countries that otherwise have very little in common. The answer is rarely spectacle alone. At its best, Hollywood is exceptionally good at building emotional investment, finding ways to make audiences care deeply about outcomes that, on paper, have little to do with their own lives.
The emotions at the center of these stories are universal. Courage, sacrifice, ambition, romance, family, hope — none belong to America. What Hollywood mastered is a particular way of organizing stories around those emotions and then distributing them on a global scale.
You can see that influence in surprisingly practical ways. Ron still meets people who say they learned English by watching “Happy Days.” British and Australian actors often arrive on American productions fluent in American accents because they grew up on American television. For decades, American television brought everyday versions of the country into living rooms around the world, making America feel familiar even to people who had never set foot here.
Those stories point to something larger than popularity. For generations, American entertainment helped shape how people around the world imagined success, freedom, opportunity and reinvention. Even when viewers had no intention of moving here, they became familiar with the American dream: the belief that where you start does not necessarily determine where you end up.
American movies have returned again and again to the underdog, the outsider, the skeptic, the person who challenges authority and decides the story isn’t over yet. Whether the setting is a Senate chamber, a newsroom, a boxing ring or a rap battle, the appeal comes from the same faith that power can be confronted, corruption can be exposed, and even damaged institutions can be forced to answer to the truth.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “All the President’s Men” are both deeply critical of power, yet among the most optimistic American films ever made. Both suggest that individuals can confront powerful institutions and still make a difference. They are skeptical without becoming cynical.
We know life does not always work that way, but these stories help to remind us that it could. For a long time, Hollywood was less inclined to examine the gap between that promise and reality. Many of the people who built the industry were immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who had real reasons to romanticize America. They saw elegance in Fred Astaire, freedom in reinvention and commercial wisdom in happy endings.
After World War II, American filmmakers became more willing to confront uncertainty, disappointment and the gap between the country’s ideals and realities. By the 1970s, American films had grown rougher and more skeptical. Yet even as the stories became darker, they rarely abandoned the idea that individual choices still mattered.
Ron felt that tension directly while we were making “Cinderella Man.” James J. Braddock, the real-life heavyweight boxer played by Russell Crowe, wasn’t simply a symbol of perseverance. He was a husband and father trying to feed his children during the Depression, which made his comeback feel less like sports mythology than a story about the cost of believing in the American dream when the cupboard is bare.
In the last 30 years, the most important new American storytelling language has been hip-hop, even if some people were slow to recognize it. Like Hollywood decades earlier, hip-hop became a distinctly American art form that spread globally without losing its local roots. When Brian was producing “Boomerang” in the early ’90s, he encountered the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the world surrounding him, and came away convinced he was hearing something larger than a trend. A prominent newspaper editor later told him hip-hop would pass. Brian heard something else, a language already defining how younger America spoke, moved, argued and imagined itself.
It took another decade, and a movie called “8 Mile,” to make that argument on screen in a way that traveled everywhere. That film feels to both of us like one of the defining American movies. The story is deeply rooted in Detroit, yet audiences around the world understood its emotional core. Its appeal had little to do with geography. It came from a familiar human desire: to be seen, to be heard and to prove that your voice matters.
For much of the twentieth century, American entertainment primarily exported stories. Streaming has created a far more reciprocal exchange. Streaming has trained American audiences to accept, and even seek out, stories told in other languages.
Ron saw evidence of that shift while directing “Thirteen Lives.” The film opens with an extended sequence in Thai. Earlier generations of executives might have worried that subtitles would alienate American audiences. Increasingly, audiences view them as a sign of authenticity rather than an obstacle. The film tested better than almost anything we’ve made, including “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind.”
The success of shows such as “Squid Game” reflects a broader change. American storytelling continues to influence the rest of the world, but it is also being influenced in return. That exchange has made audiences more adventurous and storytellers more ambitious.
That exchange may be the future of whatever cultural influence America retains, if we’re fortunate enough to keep it. America isn’t culturally magnetic because it’s simple or coherent or even particularly admirable at any given moment. It’s magnetic because it’s genuinely complicated. It has grit and glamour sharing the same room, optimism and cynicism arguing across the same table, rebellion and commerce in permanent uneasy negotiation.
We do not think people respond to American culture because they want to become American. What people continue to respond to are stories built around a certain kind of possibility: that talent can emerge from unexpected places, that circumstances can change and that individuals can still shape their own futures.
Audiences are more aware of contradictions than they once were. They are less interested in comforting myths and more interested in honest ones. Yet the appeal of reinvention remains remarkably durable. For more than a century, it has been one of America’s most successful narrative exports. Whether the country always lives up to that promise is another question.
At its best, the American story has never been about certainty. It’s been about the belief that anyone can find a voice and that once they do, the world might listen.
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