New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

For many years, overseas box office represented a supplementary income for Hollywood. It was great if a film earned as much or more internationally as it did in America, but the focus was still on making as much money at home as possible. This was partly for bragging rights and partly for nationalistic reasons - American studios wanted to make films that Americans wanted to see, and if they connected with other audiences then that was fine, too - but was also an economic necessity. Studios took (and continue to take) home a greater chunk of the domestic box office than they do from elsewhere since local distributors try to keep as much profit within their own borders as possible. As long as the international market was smaller than the American one, it made more sense to try to make as much money in America as possible.

Over the last decade, that dynamic has been pretty much completely reversed. Yes, American studios still take home a smaller piece of the pie when it comes to foreign grosses, and having a huge hit in America obviously still means a lot, but the pie itself is now much, much bigger. Blockbusters routinely gross more internationally than they do domestically, and there has been a slow yet undeniable shift in recent years towards making films that appeal more to foreign consumers than American ones. This culminated last weekend with the release of Transformers: Age of Extinction, which not only grossed more internationally than domestically in its opening weekend, but, thanks to a relentless local marketing campaign and some serious pandering when it comes to location shooting, grossed almost as much in China alone as it did in America over opening weekend. This is the new reality where box office is concerned: With spiraling budgets and a still sluggish economy, Hollywood blockbusters must look outside of America's borders in order to make a profit.

To reflect this change, this new column will focus on what's happening at the international box office each weekend, hoping to shed light on how Hollywood is embracing this brave new world. In this debut installment, I'll look primarily at the number one film in the world right now, and try to gauge what it means about the current state of Hollywood filmmaking. Future columns will focus on multiple films, but for now there really is only one film worth talking about when it comes to overseas box office.

The number one film internationally this weekend was the one that provided the impetus for this column, Transformers: Age of Extinction. After opening to more than $200 million outside of America last week, Michael Bay's latest less than stellar fighting robots saga took $95.8 million this weekend, or nearly three times what it took at the US box office. Again, we see that the universal language of massive explosions pays dividends. Its international total now sits at $400.9 million after two weeks, $212.8 million of which came from China, and it will pass Avatar as the biggest foreign film in Chinese box office history sometime in the next week. Despite its record-setting opening there, the story of Transformers in China is only just starting, and the gap between how much it has earned there and how much it earns in America will only widen as the weeks go on. It's also worth noting that Age of Extinction is still only playing in a handful of markets, so even though it appears to be slowing down, it's at most taking a breather on its steady march to $1 billion worldwide.

This ably demonstrates just how important international box office has become to Hollywood. In the U.S., Age of Extinction is already running out of steam, and could finish with as much as $100 million less than its immediate predecessor. In days gone by, that would have been enough to kill a franchise, or at least lead the studio to make some serious changes as far as the writers and director are concerned. However, the film's success in China suggests that, even if the studio is taking a smaller cut of the profits there, that smaller cut could still make up the difference of what they're losing at home. At this point, it seems likely that Age of Extinction will take an unprecedented $400 million at the Chinese box office, which will not only be a huge boon to Paramount in the immediate future, it also marks a real breakthrough in terms of breaking American films in the world's fastest growing market. In a couple of years, we could be talking about a Hollywood film making the better part of a billion dollars from Chinese theaters alone, so we should probably be prepared for more and more Hollywood productions to have spuriously justified detours to Beijing in the years ahead.