One Chart That Should Set Off Hollywood Alarms

Earlier this year, at the dawn of the Trump restoration, a troubling trend began to emerge. Movies like Sinners, Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps did very well with North American audiences, but struggled even to match that performance overseas — let alone exceed it as tentpoles typically did.

When news was in the air that American tourism and goods were suffering from international distaste for Trump, the question at the time was whether global audiences were voting with their feet and losing interest in American-made films. It seemed plausible, at least, but more data were needed.

Still, if this were true, it would likely be the final plague to descend on the film industry — a shrinking of the global take for an industry already on wobbly ground could be the final blow.

And all this was before Trump’s cracked promise of a 100 percent tariff “on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States,” something he has floated twice without follow-through to this point.

I was reminded about this hanging question by the box office results for Universal’s Wicked: For Good, which, repeating the pattern, has performed exceptionally well in North America ($269 million so far), but has taken in a notably small share of its gross in the rest of the world, with a mere 31 percent of its total ($122 million) coming from aboard.

This actually is in line with the first Wicked movie last year, which earned almost $475 million in North American theaters but only $283.7 million overseas (37 percent of its total gross).

I’m sure there are explanations for why Wicked has missed with global audiences (maybe they don’t know The Wizard of Oz or the Broadway show on which Wicked is based are two reasons that come to mind). On the other hand, there’s probably a good reason audiences in China can’t get enough of the Zootopia franchise, which exploded over Thanksgiving with $556 million in worldwide grosses — including $272 million from China alone, the second biggest opening ever in the country behind Avengers: Endgame. (I have no theories to offer there.) Plus, in a few weeks, the new Avatar debuts, and the last one made 70 percent of its cash abroad.

But all the same, the Wicked disparity — coming on the heels of Superman, Sinners, last year’s Twisters and other high-profile titles — was striking enough to try and figure out if there is, indeed, something going on here.

As I found out, a trend has emerged…

Slow & Steady Global Decline

Getting a handle on that was more complicated than it sounds.

If you look at the total box office, year by year, the international total includes international films, so it doesn’t tell you how U.S. films did abroad. There was a need to break that down, film by film, to get a sense of things. And doing that for every film released for the last however many years is a project for an entire graduate school.

(Before you ask: I’ll also note that pleas to ChatGPT and Claude to do this for me were in vain, producing enough non-sequitur answers that, in despair, I finally asked ChatGPT if it was drunk. It denied this but said it understood why I might think so.)

Since I couldn’t divide the entire release slate, I settled on taking the 10 highest-grossing films from each year since 2017 (the complete list is below) and seeing what percentage of their grosses came from overseas. For each year, I would then take the median result, the least wobbly measurement, to see where the sort of center of gravity of big releases stood and how it was moving.

Once I stacked the decade’s biggest films side by side and ran the numbers, the trend came into full view — unmistakable, undeniable, and very much not what the studios would like to believe. This is not an anomaly or a blip, but a steady global slide Hollywood has been too distracted to notice.

I’ve put it all into one chart to start (sit down — it’s shocking), and then I’ll take you through the annual splits for the top 10 films overseas vs. domestic across the past decade: