Foreign Movies: Remember Them?
In 2000-01, a Mandarin-language movie with Asian stars and lots of aerial kung fu became a North American box-office sensation ($128 million, back when that was real money) and a legitimate contender for Oscar glory. But Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Zhang Yimou's similar martial-arts epic Hero ($53 million), were just glorious flukes. The impact of non-English-language films from outside the U.S. was almost nil this decade, even in their home countries; Hollywood product dominated the world. And the all-time top-grossing foreign-language film, with $371 million in the U.S. and Canada, and another $241 million abroad, was in a dead language, Aramaic: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004). Another fluke: no one else was able to tap the evangelical market and produce a runaway Christian hit.