The image of Russia in Hollywood flicks may not always be friendly, but Russians still love them. Icon image: Peter Thomas on Pixabay (Public Domain)
Russian film industry since the start of the Ukraine conflict: pirated content, local content and technical challenges.
Not surprisingly, the Russian film industry has been in quite a turmoil these months. Hollywood’s withdrawal from the Russian market for political reasons, and the resulting lack of US film titles for Russian cinemas and the streaming platforms there, have serious consequences: There are plans in the management floors of the Russian film industry to fundamentally turn to the Far East and the turn to the East Asian cinema market.
At the same time, the industry is confronted with technical problems – and with a new challenge from the question of how to deal with pirated copies. But how difficult is the situation really? And is there any hope of improvement?
Hollywoods Soft Power
It all started in March, shortly after the Russian military’s “special operation” broke out. Several major Hollywood studios (Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, Paramount Global, etc.) announced that they are suspending the release of their new films in Russian cinemas.
The first “cancelled” titles included the already firmly planned blockbuster launches of the latest version of “Batman” with Robert Pattinson, “Morbius” with Jared Leto, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”, the new “Sonic the Hedgehog” and others . The Russian box office had just started to recover economically after the pandemic years when this surprising situation turned into a new, difficult challenge.
Russia hasn’t been Hollywood’s biggest foreign market in recent years. In the most recent pre-pandemic year of 2019, however, it was in the top ten for overseas box office, albeit well behind China, Japan and South Korea, as well as the UK. The US had worked hard for many years to establish and expand its presence in the Russian entertainment industry.
Added to this is the undeniable cultural influence: the admiration, fascination and emulation of the standards and aesthetics of Hollywood film by Russian filmmakers and viewers. As a result, Hollywood cinema has become an important soft power that has influenced Russian society and leisure in many ways. Hollywood projects dominated in Russian cinemas: American films had made up to 80 percent of the box office there.
An interesting question beyond all economic issues is therefore: If we understand Hollywood as a soft power of American cultural imperialism in Russian culture – what will be the consequences of the current situation?
Will the US permanently lose cultural influence? Will the United States and Hollywood now lose the culture war? To be honest, that’s unlikely. Because the admiration for everything that comes out of Hollywood is unbroken.
The mass of the audience just remains on hold and hopes that the Americans will return quickly. On the day when Hollywood cinema returns to Russia, all screenings will be sold out. Especially for blockbusters, superhero movies and anything starring stars.
New, repeated or old?
The cinemas are still open. But now the cinemas have to fill their schedules with the titles they have. In the process of adapting to this new reality, cinemas are increasingly focusing on artistically significant “festival films” and auteur cinema, on new Russian projects, re-releases, retrospectives and special screenings – in other words, everything that would normally lead a shadowy and niche existence is shown broadly.
For the second time, Russian audiences have enjoyed Thomas Vinterberg’s bittersweet alcohol comedy “Another Round” (the title is ironically appropriate to the current situation), Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer”, Florian Zeller’s “The Father” and “Only lovers left alive” seen by Jim Jarmusch.
In the near future theaters will also be showing re-enactments of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. II, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, the documentary Metallica Through the Never and all parts of The Expendables.
Recent European “firsts” have included titles screened at European film festivals in 2021. Most of them were shot by small independent or art-house film studios: “The worst person in the world”, “Drive my car”, “Men” (all screened in Cannes in different years), “Wolf” (Toronto) , “Official Competition” (Venice Film Festival) and others.
In addition, there are retrospectives of the greats of auteur film: the Soviet director hero Andrei Tarkovsky, the influential Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurow, his younger colleague Alexey German, but also the Swede Ingmar Bergman, which have also already taken place.
But without access to new Hollywood productions, the question arises in the medium term: are Russians, who are used to watching American and European blockbusters, also willing to turn to films from Asia, India or Latin America instead?
Projects from these regions have their own thematic specificities, atmosphere and dynamics that are very unusual for the average viewer and may seem too exotic for Russians to widely consume and embrace.
However, the first trends in an anonymous, independent survey of cinema-goers make the cinema industry optimistic. According to the study, 40 percent of the Russians surveyed are interested in Korean films, while 32 percent are still interested in Latin American films, 19 percent in Indian films and 10 percent in Chinese films.
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