The Empire That Ate Cinema: The Parasitic Hegemony
In 2023, the livelihoods of thousands of British film and television workers were firmly in the hands of American studios and unions. Hollywood’s writers went on strike in May, followed by its actors in July, and productions across Britain began shutting down. British crews, employed on British soil and working under different agreements, found themselves without work while American companies negotiated with their own workforce. They had no influence over the disputes, no means of bringing them to an end and no equivalent contractual gains awaiting them when they were resolved. Yet the industry’s dependence on Hollywood had left their employment at the mercy of those negotiations. By September, a survey of nearly 4,000 British freelancers found that three quarters were not working, while 80 per cent said the American strikes had directly affected their employment.
The strikes ended, but the work did not return. A wider downturn continued throughout 2024, with ‘Survive ’til ’25’ becoming a refrain among workers and production companies struggling to stay afloat. Then, in 2025, Britain recorded its highest-ever film production spending at £2.77 billion. Of that, £2.51 billion came from inward investment. Domestic British productions accounted for just £193 million, despite considerably outnumbering their internationally financed counterparts.
Hollywood’s investment employs thousands of British workers, supports major studios and sustains a considerable network of technical expertise. Successive governments have encouraged it through financial incentives, building an industry increasingly geared towards attracting productions controlled overseas. The resulting prosperity is celebrated as a triumph of British filmmaking, even as the films themselves, and the power to commission or withdraw them, remain largely in foreign hands.
Across the world, similar patterns emerge. Governments offer incentives, studios expand and skilled workforces develop to attract Hollywood productions. The investment strengthens national film industries, but increasingly ties their fortunes to companies operating beyond their control. Hollywood draws upon their labour, infrastructure and public investment to produce films whose ownership, distribution and commercial control remain concentrated in American hands.
Made in Britain, Owned Elsewhere
A film does not have to be British-owned to qualify as British. Under the British Film Institute’s Cultural Test, a production needs just 18 out of 35 points, barely 51 per cent, to receive British certification and become eligible for government-backed tax incentives. Points can be awarded for filming in Britain, employing British crews and actors, or recording dialogue in English. British ownership of the intellectual property is not required. A film can therefore be British enough to receive public support without the companies financing or controlling it being British at all.
Consider Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Produced by Disney’s Lucasfilm, the seventh instalment in an unmistakably American franchise was filmed extensively in Britain, with Pinewood Studios providing much of its production infrastructure. Its two new protagonists, Rey and Finn, were played by British actors Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, alongside fellow British performers including but not limited to Andy Serkis, Gwendoline Christie and Anthony Daniels. Britain provided the studios, crews and technical expertise, but also some of the most recognisable faces of the film itself. The production received British film tax relief and qualified as British, despite the franchise, its characters and its commercial rights belonging to the American corporation Disney.
The Cultural Test is generous by design. Britain wants these productions, and the system is intended to attract them. The BFI must support an entire industry, including the thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on overseas investment. Its responsibilities are economic as well as cultural. But that generosity has another, rather convenient consequence. A stricter definition of British cinema, one that placed greater importance on ownership and creative control, would produce a considerably less flattering picture of the national industry.
In 2025, the UK and Ireland formed the world’s fifth-largest theatrical market, generating approximately $1.5 billion in box-office revenue. British stories have also demonstrated their capacity for extraordinary commercial success. In 2012, Skyfall became the highest-grossing film in British box-office history, earning more than £100 million. It held that record until the previously mentioned The Force Awakens surpassed it in January 2016. James Bond, a character created by Ian Fleming and sustained for decades by British filmmakers, had outperformed every other film released in his own country. Worldwide, Skyfall earned more than $1 billion, with Eon Productions producing the film alongside MGM and Sony Pictures handling most of its international distribution.
Yet independent British cinema is strikingly underrepresented at the box office, even in its home market. The BFI distinguishes British independent films, generally made without major American studio or streaming involvement and with significant British financial and creative control, from the wider category of British-qualifying productions. In 2025, those independent films accounted for just 6.8 per cent of the UK and Ireland box office and a mere 1.3 per cent worldwide. For all the country’s appetite for cinema, films made under independent British control attracted less than seven pounds of every hundred spent in its own cinemas. Include all British-qualifying films, however, and the worldwide share rises to 19.7 per cent. Under the broader definition of British cinema, the country’s apparent share of the worldwide box office becomes fifteen times larger.
Britain has developed the talent and infrastructure to help make some of the world’s most successful films, without building comparably powerful independent institutions to finance, own and distribute British cinema.
The Price of Investment
The extraordinary growth of Britain’s film industry has created a peculiar problem: the facilities and expertise that make it attractive to Hollywood are becoming increasingly difficult for independent British filmmakers to afford. Major international productions can offer higher wages and pay more for studio space, equipment and specialist services, while smaller domestic productions must compete for those same resources on budgets that have scarcely grown. The same investment that sustains Britain’s filmmaking infrastructure can make that infrastructure prohibitively expensive for the filmmakers who depend upon it.
In 2022, an economic review commissioned by the BFI found that the expansion of internationally financed productions had driven up the costs of cast, crew and studio space, while independent production budgets were stagnating or declining. Falling revenues from traditional sources further reduced producers’ ability to absorb those costs. The review warned that these pressures threatened the sector’s viability to the point of market failure. Three years later, a parliamentary committee reached much the same conclusion, finding that Britain’s success in attracting overseas productions had increased costs and restricted independent filmmakers’ access to essential resources.
Successive governments have encouraged that investment through financial incentives. Britain’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit offers a taxable credit worth 34 per cent of qualifying production expenditure, helping attract international productions that bring substantial employment and business to the country. Yet the government has also introduced an enhanced 53 per cent credit for eligible low-budget films, recognising the difficulties facing domestic producers. Britain now offers financial incentives to attract the international productions transforming its film industry, while providing additional relief to help independent filmmakers survive the costs of working within it.
Hollywood’s advantage is its ability to choose where that investment goes. Studios can compare tax incentives, exchange rates, labour costs and available facilities across competing countries before deciding where to film. In evidence submitted to a parliamentary inquiry, Amazon warned that it was considerably easier to relocate a production than other forms of economic activity, and that changes in British policy or operating costs could cause productions to leave at short notice. The warning came from one of the companies Britain was competing to attract. British studios, workers and successive governments had invested in making the country an appealing place to produce entertainment, while the companies commissioning that entertainment retained the freedom to take their business elsewhere.
Nor is Britain exceptional. In 2024–25, Canada recorded C$5.32 billion in foreign location and service production, encompassing film, television and visual-effects work. Federal and provincial governments provided an estimated C$2.15 billion in refundable production-services tax credits to support such activity. The investment sustained Canadian businesses and employment, but copyright in almost all these productions belonged to non-Canadian producers, placing the long-term commercial opportunities of ownership largely beyond Canada’s reach.
Hollywood’s international mobility has become a source of leverage over the countries competing for its investment. It can take its productions wherever the terms are most favourable. The industries those countries have built to accommodate them cannot so easily follow.
Who Controls the Movies?
In a town of just 37,000 people, my local cinema has scheduled eighteen screenings of Avengers: Doomsday in a single day, beginning at six in the morning. Hollywood does not need to own Britain’s cinemas to dominate their screens. Exhibitors understandably prioritise the films most likely to attract paying audiences, but every screen devoted to one production is a screen unavailable to another. Independent filmmakers are not simply competing to attract audiences. They must first compete for the opportunity to reach them. Hollywood’s dominance is sustained by commercial decisions that make perfect sense to the businesses taking them.
In 2025, Universal, Disney and Warner Bros. accounted for approximately 67 per cent of the UK and Ireland box office between them. Every film in the year’s top ten was distributed by an American company, including the distinctly British Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Across Europe, American studio productions occupied eighteen of the twenty places at the top of the admissions chart. Their enormous marketing budgets, established franchises and international distribution networks make them exceptionally attractive to exhibitors, whose decisions reinforce the advantages those productions already possess. Each successful release strengthens the commercial case for giving the next one similarly prominent treatment.
Yet controlling what audiences see is only part of Hollywood’s power. Intellectual property can generate commercial value long after a film has finished its theatrical run, through sequels, adaptations, licensing and merchandise. The companies controlling those rights can profit from a creation for generations, but their influence extends beyond the money it earns. Ownership can also confer the authority to determine what becomes of a story, who is permitted to tell it and how its characters are presented to the world.
Consider James Bond. When Skyfall broke British box-office records in 2012, the franchise was already an international commercial institution, supported by American financing and distribution but guided creatively by the Broccoli family. For more than sixty years, British producers had exercised extraordinary stewardship over a character created by Ian Fleming. In February 2025, that arrangement changed. Amazon MGM announced a joint venture with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, completed the following month, under which the parties remained co-owners of the franchise while Amazon gained creative control. The family retained a financial interest, and Bond remained a distinctly British creation. But the authority to decide his future had passed to an American corporation.
And Bond is hardly alone. In 2021, Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, assuming ownership of a business responsible for managing some of Britain’s most recognisable literary creations. Its ambitions extended beyond adaptations into publishing, games, live entertainment and consumer products. Hasbro acquired Peppa Pig through its purchase of Entertainment One in 2019, while Mattel’s acquisition of HIT Entertainment in 2012 brought Thomas & Friends, Bob the Builder and Fireman Sam into its portfolio. As entertainment franchises increasingly span film, television, publishing and merchandising, American corporate ownership extends well beyond properties created for cinema. These transactions involved different companies, properties and rights, but together they demonstrate how repeatedly British-created cultural properties have passed into American corporate ownership.
The consequences extend beyond the balance sheet. The company controlling a cultural property can determine how it is adapted, which elements of its identity are retained and which audiences it is intended to reach. Cultural specificity may be commercially valuable, but the interests of an international corporation need not coincide with those of the culture that produced the work. Decisions about its future can be made primarily according to its potential appeal across global markets, with little obligation to preserve the qualities that made it distinctive. Such acquisitions therefore represent more than an accumulation of valuable characters. They transfer substantial authority over how parts of another culture are represented to the world.
Hollywood has not extinguished the world’s other film industries. In 2025, domestic productions accounted for approximately 90 per cent of cinema admissions in India, 76 per cent in Japan and 74 per cent in China. The Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2 became the year’s highest-grossing film worldwide, earning more than $2 billion. Yet approximately 97 per cent of its revenue came from mainland China. Its success demonstrated the extraordinary commercial power of a national cinema, but also the distinction between commanding an enormous domestic audience and reaching audiences across the world. Hollywood’s great advantage is its ability to do both, drawing upon international markets through distribution networks that few competing industries can match.
Glasgow became Manhattan for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. An American character, created for stories set among the skyscrapers of New York, was brought to life on British streets and sound stages, with Pinewood providing production facilities and British crews and performers contributing their expertise. The completed film travelled internationally through Sony’s distribution network, reinforcing the commercial strength of a franchise whose value had accumulated over generations. It was an international production in almost every practical sense, but the ownership and commercial authority underpinning its success remained firmly within Hollywood.
Hollywood can take its own stories abroad, employing the workers and facilities of other nations to manufacture them, even as American entertainment corporations acquire the rights to stories those nations created themselves. Its films travel through distribution networks that reach audiences across the world, drawing upon an industrial advantage that has accumulated for more than a century. The Movies did not begin in Hollywood, and their history has never belonged to America alone. What began as one filmmaking centre among several became the dominant commercial force in an art form practised across the world, capable of turning the creative resources of other nations into further advantages for itself.
A country can possess extraordinary filmmakers, studios and stories without the commercial power to bring those stories before the world. Its workers can make Hollywood’s blockbusters, its taxpayers can help finance them and its audiences can fill the cinemas, while its own films struggle for screens and its most cherished cultural creations pass into foreign hands. These nations are not merely competing against Hollywood. They are providing the labour, infrastructure, investment and cultural wealth that help maintain its dominance over them. The extraordinary achievement of Hollywood’s empire is that it has made the rest of the world indispensable to its success, while leaving so much of that world dependent upon it for success of its own.
That is the empire Hollywood built. And that is what it has eaten.
Sources and Further Reading
- Bectu — Three quarters of UK film and TV workers currently out of work (September 2023). Supports the survey of nearly 4,000 freelancers, the 75% unemployment figure and the 80% affected by the American strikes.
https://bectu.org.uk/news/three-quarters-of-uk-film-and-tv-workers-currently-out-of-work-bectu-survey - BFI — Official 2025 film and high-end TV production statistics. Supports the £2.77 billion film production total, £2.51 billion inward investment and £193 million domestic production figures.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/official-bfi-statistics-2025 - Deadline — Who Survived ‘Til ’25? (January 2025). Documents the prolonged downturn and the industry’s widespread use of the phrase.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/survived-til-25-taking-temperature-100000210.html - BFI — The Cultural Test for Film. Establishes the 18-out-of-35-point threshold and the certification system.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/apply-british-certification-expenditure-credits/cultural-test-film - BFI — Cultural Test Points Summary. Provides the actual criteria for location, language, personnel and production activity.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/apply-british-certification-expenditure-credits/cultural-test-film/summary-points-cultural-test-film - Film London — UK Film Tax Relief. Confirms that Star Wars: The Force Awakens used Britain’s tax-relief arrangements.
https://filmlondon.org.uk/filming-in-london/tax-relief - Film Distributors’ Association — World’s Top 10 Theatrical Markets, 2025. Establishes the UK and Ireland as the fifth-largest market, worth approximately $1.5 billion.
https://filmdistributorsassociation.com/the-industry/databank/worldwide-box-office/top-10-territories/ - BFI — UK Films at the Worldwide Box Office, 2025. The key statistical source for the 19.7% share for UK-qualifying films and 1.3% for UK independent films, including the BFI’s independent-film definition.
https://core-cms.bfi.org.uk/media/43747/download - BFI — Official 2025 Film Statistics. Also supports UK independent films’ 6.8% domestic market share.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/official-bfi-statistics-2025 - The Guardian — The Force Awakens Overtakes Skyfall (January 2016). Establishes the chronology of Skyfall’s British box-office record and its replacement.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/08/star-wars-the-force-awakens-overtakes-skyfall-to-become-uks-biggest-ever-film - BFI — Economic Review of UK Independent Film (2022). The most important source for the argument about rising production costs, stagnating budgets, declining revenues and the risk of market failure.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/economic-review-uk-independent-film - UK Parliament — British Film and High-End Television (2025). Supports the findings about rising costs and reduced access to production resources, alongside Amazon’s warning that productions could relocate at short notice.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmcumeds/328/report.html - HMRC — Additional Support for Independent Film. Confirms the 34% standard Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit and the 53% enhanced independent film credit.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/corporation-tax-tax-relief-for-independent-film-productions/additional-support-for-independent-film - Canadian Media Producers Association — Profile 2025. Documents C$5.32 billion in foreign location and service production in 2024–25.
https://cmpa.ca/profile/ - Canadian Media Producers Association — Tax Credit Financing. Confirms the estimated C$2.15 billion in federal and provincial refundable production-services tax credits.
https://profile.cmpa.ca/en/foreign-location-and-service-production/75-tax-credit-financing - Film Distributors’ Association — UK and Ireland Box Office, 2025. Confirms Universal’s 25%, Disney’s 23% and Warner Bros.’ 19% market shares.
https://filmdistributorsassociation.com/2026/01/uk-and-ireland-annual-box-office-exceeds-1bn-for-third-consecutive-year/ - European Audiovisual Observatory — Global and European Cinema, 2025. Supports the eighteen American studio productions in Europe’s top twenty, the domestic market shares in India, Japan and China, and Ne Zha 2’s worldwide position.
https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/-/asia-drives-global-box-office-growth-while-european-films-hold-strong-locally - Amazon MGM — James Bond Joint Venture (February–March 2025). Confirms the Broccoli family’s continuing co-ownership and Amazon’s acquisition of creative control.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-mgm-studios-james-bond - Netflix — Acquisition of the Roald Dahl Story Company (2021). Confirms the acquisition and Netflix’s ambitions for adaptations, games, publishing and other commercial exploitation.
https://about.netflix.com/news/netflix-acquires-iconic-roald-dahl-story-company - Hasbro — Acquisition of Entertainment One (2019). Confirms the transaction involving Peppa Pig.
https://hasbropr.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-completes-acquisition-entertainment-one - Animation World Network — Mattel Acquires HIT Entertainment (2012). Confirms the acquisition involving Thomas & Friends, Bob the Builder and Fireman Sam.
https://www.awn.com/news/mattel-acquires-hit-entertainment - South China Morning Post — China’s 2025 Box Office. Supports the approximately $2.2 billion worldwide gross of Ne Zha 2 and its 97% mainland-Chinese revenue share.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3338521/chinas-box-office-22-2025-us74-billion-led-record-breaking-ne-zha-2 - Variety — Behind the Scenes of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Supports Glasgow’s use as New York. The Pinewood production is also documented in contemporary trade reporting.
https://au.variety.com/2026/film/features/spider-man-brand-new-day-exclusive-behind-the-scenes-tom-holland-40947/
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