Tweaking US movies to fit international tastes (WSJ)

By Nancy Tartaglione

The rising clout of international audiences is a sea change for Hollywood, says The Wall Street Journal, contending that as foreign ticket sales represent nearly 68% of the roughly $32 billion global film market, one of the most American of products is now being retooled to suit foreign tastes.

Some examples offered up by the paper: Studios have begun to cast foreign actors in American-themed blockbusters like "G.I. Joe," scripts are being rewritten to lure global audiences and studios are cutting back on standard Hollywood fare like romantic comedies because foreign moviegoers often don't find American jokes all that funny.

"We need to make movies that have the ability to break out internationally," Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, tells the paper. "That's the only way to make the economic puzzle of film production work today."

But satisfying foreign audiences has been tricky for Hollywood as increasingly sophisticated local films are giving Hollywood a run for its money.

In South Korea, ticket sales to local movies accounted for about 10% or 20% of box-office revenue in the 1990s. Hollywood movies grabbed the lion's share. Now, local fare makes up nearly 50% of South Korean ticket sales, says the Journal citing Screen Digest.

Fox International Productions chief Sanford Panitch tells the paper that he sometimes uses Fox's vast array of film production resources like relationships with special-effects companies to dress up foreign films. But he says it's more important to draw on local producers and their expertise to make films that appeal to that particular audience.

"It's not about bringing Hollywood tactics to the foreign markets, " Panitch says. "It's about participating in a local culture enough to create a product that those audiences will actually want to watch."

Over at Universal, meanwhile, the Journal reports that the script for Battleship was retooled when London-based David Kosse had a look and deemed it "too American" because the evil aliens doing the threatening were only targeting the US. Universal asked the writers to redo the script and now the whole world is in peril.

"I can tell you that no studio head is going to make a big expensive movie that cost $150 million or $200 million unless it has worldwide appeal," Mark Zoradi, the former president of Disney's Motion Pictures Group, tells the Journal. "You can't pay back that production cost on the domestic model alone."

When Paramount, according to the Journal, was concerned over a joke in Adam McKay's "The Other Guys" that involves NY Yankee Derek Jeter - would foreigners get it? - the studio asked McKay to spend his summer re-shooting those scenes with international sports stars, going after soccer stars David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Sony wanted to release a separate version of the film abroad starring Beckham or Ronaldo—rather than Jeter.

Neither soccer player was available in the end. But the studio plans to use the strategy in the future. "I gotta tell you, I loved the idea and still think it's really smart," McKay says.

"It's a whole new way of looking at movies," he adds. "Rather than trying to veer your audience toward the film, just tweak your film to the audience. Next, I'd like to start tweaking movies by region, one version for the Midwest, another for the East Coast, and the South."