‘Avatar’ Struggles Show How Japan Is Ditching Hollywood
The world’s third-largest box office is dumping western movies for local animated hits. Hollywood needs to pay attention.
Made in Japan.
Photographer: Monica Schipper/Getty Images North AmericaIn its economic heyday of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a curious phenomenon of Hollywood celebrities showing up in Japanese commercials: Arnold Schwarzenegger hawking instant noodles, Harrison Ford pitching Kirin beer. To this day, Tommy Lee Jones still appears in a long-standing series advertising canned coffee.
You won’t, however, see much of the current generation of Hollywood stars — no Dwayne Johnson promoting Toyotas, no Ryan Reynolds plugging energy drinks. That’s not just because Japanese firms don’t have the market budget they once had — Johnny Depp recently advertised Asahi beer — but because of a growing, often ignored fact: In Japan, Hollywood isn’t the draw it used to be.