The Decentralization of Global Cinema: Why Geography No Longer Dictates Hits

For most of the last century, a film's commercial ceiling was set on the day it was greenlit — largely by which of a handful of studios in Los Angeles decided to make it. That structural fact has quietly collapsed. Several of the most-watched pieces of scripted entertainment in 2025 were produced outside the United States, and our view is that this is not an anomaly but the emerging topology of the industry.

Three forces are compounding. Streaming has severed the historical link between distribution capacity and geography — a well-shot Norwegian drama and a marquee American thriller arrive on the same shelf, at the same time, in the same eighty-seven languages. Production infrastructure has proliferated: high-fidelity virtual-production volumes are now operating across Central Europe, Southeast Asia, and West Africa at a technical standard that would have required Burbank a decade ago. And audience taste has re-anchored around specificity — viewers can now smell a formulaic Anglo-American product from three trailers away.

For institutional capital, the implication is a reweighting rather than a rotation. We are not abandoning theatrical exposure to Hollywood; we are ceasing to treat it as the default. Our H1 2026 rebalancing added meaningful weight to two regional platforms — a Seoul-based scripted studio with distribution treaties across all major East Asian territories, and a Copenhagen production group with a decade of consistent international sales.

The risk profile of decentralised production is not lower; it is different. Currency exposure, regional talent scarcity, and platform-concentration risk all move to the foreground. But the diversification benefit is real. When one regional cycle contracts, another is typically expanding, and portfolios built with genuine geographic breadth exhibit materially lower drawdowns than single-market slates.

We expect the next five years to reward investors who treat the film and television industry the way sophisticated allocators treat public equities: as a global asset class with distinct regional factor exposures, not as a single American market that occasionally imports.