Last year, The Tourist, a romantic thriller starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie,was released to scathing reviews from top critics like Roger Ebert (“the plot is preposterous”) and Peter Travers (“in a year of craptaculars, The Tourist deserves burial at the bottom of the 2010 dung heap”). The Tourist didn’t fare much better with audiences: with a budget of $100 million and two of Hollywood’s most bankable actors The Tourist barely grossed over $67 million domestically by the end of its theatrical run.

At the Golden Globes in January, host Ricky Gervais quipped, “It seemed like everything this year was three-dimensional. Except the characters in The Tourist.” Both critically and commercially, The Tourist was poised to be a massive flop for Sony Pictures.

And then it was released abroad.

As The Tourist expanded into the international market, it began to pick up steam, with particularly strong ticket sales in countries as diverse as China, Germany, Italy, and Japan. By the time The Tourist completed its global theatrical run, it had made over $210 million―or 75 percent of its total box office gross―in international ticket sales alone.

The Tourist’s international success speaks to a larger trend that has developed over the past decade: the rise of the international box office. Though Hollywood studios have long distributed their movies internationally, recent years have seen a dramatic increase in money flowing in from foreign filmgoers. And considering 2010 saw the smallest American film audiences in 15 years, every international dollar counts.

There is no greater sign of the power of the emerging international market than Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. With four films to date, the franchise has generated over $3.5 billion in global box office receipts. After the 2003 release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the series’ well-received first film, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise drew its highest overall gross (both domestically and internationally) with its second installment, Dead Man’s Chest, in 2006. But the real story emerges when Pirates of the Caribbean’s domestic grosses are compared to its international grosses:

As the graphs show, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has seen continually diminishing returns in the United States since the release of Dead Man’s Chest in 2006. But in the international market, the series’ total box office returns have remained steady. If Pirates of the Caribbean’s success was solely a matter of domestic performance, the franchise would likely be winding down, like so many older played-out Hollywood franchises before it. But thanks to the series’ continuing success abroad, we can look forward to at least two more Pirates of the Caribbean films, with the possibility of even more beyond – at least, until international audiences grow as tired of Johnny Depp’s guyliner as their American counterparts.

At first glance, this level of box office analysis may seem irrelevant to anyone who’s not a studio head or a film financier; after all, the average movoegoer’s stake in a film is rarely more than the cost of a ticket. But as Hollywood studios continue to recognize—and exploit—the spending power of the international audiences in Europe and Asia, their movies will be aimed at the broadest possible market.

Last summer’s well-reviewed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a quirky film with no major stars, and specifically aimed at video game-literate twenty-somethings, was far too culturally specific to make waves abroad. It drew barely one-third of its total gross from the international market. By contrast, the poorly-received Knight and Day, a conventional Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, made over 70 percent of its total gross abroad, despite a relatively chilly reception stateside.

The international box office that saved middling blockbusters like Knight and Day and The Tourist wasn’t there to save Scott Pilgrim, and as a result, Hollywood studios are less likely to make another film like it. In the future, we can expect to see even more homogenized blockbusters emerge as the norm: big-name actors and big explosions are the surest routes to mass-market, cross-cultural appeal.

As we look to the future, which country will have the greatest impact on Hollywood? According to American filmmaker and actor Matt Duggan, the Chinese box office is “the new force to be reckoned with.”

Even now, China’s communist government routinely censors Hollywood films before they permit the films to be released in theaters. More often than not, films are censored for content that the government views as critical of Chinese culture; previous examples include Mission Impossible 3, which featured an action sequence set in a run-down neighborhood in Shanghai, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which featured a Chinese villain played by Chow Yun-Fat. Studios allow these changes because Chinese film audiences have a legitimate impact on a film’s financial success or failure; China is one of the world’s leading emerging economies, and its massive population represents a largely-untapped source of potential box office revenue.

The most dramatic signifier of China’s box office power came in March with the news that MGM was voluntarily spending $1 million in post-production to alter its upcoming Red Dawn remake so that the villains are North Korean, not Chinese. North Koreans, after all, have very little impact on a film’s financial success. And these types of changes will be increasingly more common; Duggan predicts that “studios will continue to incorporate new storylines, casting choices,and directors, for the purpose of appealing to the huge new emerging classes in countries like China.”

But before we mourn homogenization of the Hollywood blockbuster, it’s worth noting that this phenomenon has also led to some positive changes.

The rise of the international box office has led to a decline in offensive, simplistic and stereotypical depictions of foreign characters, and engendered a genuine movement in Hollywood to depict foreign cultures more accurately.

To make sure that every detail in the film was correct, Kung Fu Panda 2’s filmmakers actually traveled to China to research traditional Chinese culture. Even Hollywood casts are growing more diverse; as Duggan notes, The Green Hornet’s second-billed star is Taiwanese singer/actor Jay Chou, who’s relatively unknown in the United States but massively popular in Asia (a fact reflected in the film’s above-average performance in Asian countries). The impact of this cultural sensitivity is already being felt; despite a middling box office performance in the United States when compared with its predecessor, Kung Fu Panda 2 has smashed box office records in China, with the best Saturday opening in the country’s history.

In the end, the best we can hope for is that the globalization of Hollywood will lead to greater diversity and tolerance in Hollywood movies. At its best, film can offer a window into another way of life, and a clever studio could harness the power of the international box office to make a movie that’s genuinely– cross-cultural.

Scott Meslow is a staff writer for Campus Progress. He can be reached at [email protected].