Here’s a prediction: in its first week Spider-Man made $150-million and everybody was zonked out. Ten years from now Spider-Man will make $1-billion in its first week. But Spider-Man will probably be Chinese. And the city in which he operates will not be New York, it will be Shanghai. And yet it will be an international film, it will still be Spider-Man.
Why will this happen? American culture has been able to dominate the world because it has had the biggest home market. When you have a huge home market you can use it as a springboard and capture markets around the world. But the United States’s entertainment business is becoming more dependent on foreign markets.
Last year business for American films overseas fell by 16% against local product. In the past, the Japanese film industry was almost killed by the American film industry as US companies took all the distribution outlets. Now the Japanese are fighting back.
The biggest success in Japan last year was not an American film, it was a Japanese film. The biggest success in Germany was not an American film, it was a German film. The biggest success in Spain was not an American film, but a Spanish film. In India, of course, it’s always been like that.
Fewer films are being made in the US, and fewer films are being funded by the US. Last year one-third of all Hollywood product was funded by German banks. In 10 years’ time most of the funding will be Asian. And the next big studio will be Asian.
To survive, the American entertainment business needs the overseas market. Can it sustain it? If you take the main Asian markets — Japan, India, China — and their derivatives — Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Arab countries, East Africa, Egypt, Iran, Morocco — you have 80% of the world’s population. Almost 60% of the population of India is under 30. The demographics of Asia are much more in line with the demographics of the entertainment industry, which run roughly from 15 to 30; the market for Bollywood video games runs as far down as 14 to 30.
The argument that is always put against the emergence of a dominant Asian film industry is piracy. There will be no big markets in Asia, runs this argument, because of rampant piracy.
That’s a fallacy. All pirates do is create the business models for the market. Here’s an example from India.
In the US the most difficult thing for cable TV has been what they call “the last mile”. If you are a big cable company, how do you get it into the homes — that one last mile to the consumer?
In India, about eight or nine years ago, a guy came to my house and said: “You’ve got four state channels right now. I’ll give you 15 channels. You pay me the equivalent of US75c per month and I’ll give you 50 channels, all illegally.” He used to run a video store, and now he is one of the biggest cable operators in Bombay. He’s gone legit. But his first thing was piracy.
By the time Star TV came in the market, it found that pirates had already covered the last mile. The only thing it had to do was to make the pirates legit. Now they are Star’s biggest partners.
When I went to the world economic forum in New York, the big topic of conversation was the domination of the Western media. But it’s a non-issue.
What happens when countries like India and China become the biggest subscribers to cable TV? What will CNN do? CNN gets 10% of the Indian and Chinese markets. Ultimately the only reason you will get a Western point of view is if you are Western-owned. But your advertising is not going to be Western any more. Television is governed by advertising.
Why is it always Indians who win Miss World competitions? All the advertising comes from India: the competition would simply collapse without it. Indian cricketers are now the highest paid in the world: cricket survives because of Indian advertising.
What will be the viewpoint of the Western-owned news channels when 80% of revenues come from Asia? Will it give an Asian viewpoint? If it doesn’t, some Asian channels will come up and destroy it.
In 15 years from now, we won’t be discussing the domination of the Western media but the domination of the Chinese media, or the Asian media.
There is a profound cultural difference between Asian philosophies and Western philosophies: Eastern storytelling is mythic, Western storytelling is less so. The subtle difference that becomes a huge difference is the Eastern belief that man is ruled by his destiny. The basis of Western philosophies is that man creates his own destiny. So, will is stronger than God, faith and destiny. The underpinning of Eastern philosophies is that man is stronger in the context of his destiny, but out of that context he has no strength. So all their stories are melodramatic.
Despite the argument that the Asian diaspora is disparate, there is in fact a commonality in Asia. Hindi cinema is the dominant cinema culture in India. It’s the only national cinema in India, yet it has never been able to wipe out Tamil cinema and other local cinemas because, like Hollywood, in order to appeal to everybody it is slightly rootless. So Hindi cinema, which had become very fantastical, has started to go back to something a little more real.
For Indian cinema to become international it has to adapt. Can it?
Indian cinema is already a compromise. Bollywood is an adaptation of Western technology to an Eastern form of storytelling. Bollywood takes this method of storytelling and grafts it on to what are often straight copies of Hollywood stories.
Assimilation is what is great about Bollywood. Because India has been conquered so often, assimilation is a part of its culture. It’s also the strength of the philosophies of India, the strength of Hinduism: it refuses to define itself. Western cultures are more stone, Eastern cultures are more water. Water doesn’t define itself, it just keeps flowing. — Â