Cultural Globalization and the Motion Picture Industry:

This research examines the influence of cultural globalization on the motion picture industry. There is not yet much empirical evidence about how media products spread world-wide, thus the aim is to make a contribution to this knowledge. The focus is on analyzing to what extent globalization contributes to a further homogenization of movie spectators’ preferences in different countries and cultural contexts. The main sources used in this thesis are the box office revenues and reviews of four different countries: Argentina, Australia, the Netherlands and South Africa. The research consists of two parts: first, the shares of the box office revenues of these four countries were investigated to illustrate the presence of domestic/foreign films and Hollywood/non-Hollywood films. For the second part, the films that made it into the box offices were also used. This part is composed of a content analysis of eighty-eight film reviews. A comparison between the reviews from the four countries demonstrates whether the critics consider similar characteristics of films to be important and thus reveals to what extent we can explain global box office successes by ‘universal’ characteristics. The results demonstrate that the tastes of these different countries’ audiences are homogenizing, especially regarding the box office shares. It moreover exemplifies the ongoing dominance of Hollywood. The analysis of the reviews shows that the film aspects which are given the most significance by the critics are the content of the film, the actors and the directors. Furthermore, the analysis illustrates that each film entering all four countries’ box office revenues contains some universal characteristics.