Recently, during the weekend of December 8th-10th, the number one film at the American box office was writer/director/animator Hayao Miyazaki's latest (and perhaps last) film The Boy and the Heron. While this was in itself no surprise, with Miyazaki's films having been quite popular in the US for decades, what is interesting is that the number three spot on the box office list that week was Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One, which had debuted at number one two weeks earlier.
This means that for the first time ever, Japan had two out of the three top box office movies for the weekend. While this may just be a coincidence of releasing, with the two films sandwiched by the usual big budget Hollywood releases, I like to think that it also may show that international films may finally be getting their moment in the US. (Although I suppose I should point out that both films have been shown with both subtitled and dubbed versions, with the dubbing of course making them feel less foreign).
For decades, foreign films were delegated mostly to arthouse theaters in this country, with studios assuming that American audiences just don't like subtitles and aren't interested in stories from other cultures. Sadly, there seemed to be some truth in this, with foreign films at the Oscars almost always ghettoized by only winning a "Best Foreign Film" award and only big cities showing them on the big screen. This happened despite the fact that many of the most influential films ever made are foreign films, such as Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (remade twice as the Magnificent Seven) and Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2, which has also been remade several times, while also being turned into a Broadway musical.
But the fact that Japan did not just see animated films as just children's films lead to Japanese adult oriented animated movies and TV shows (like 1988's Akira) building cult followings in the US, aided by the rise of videotape rental stores. Another big change was the surprising win for Best Picture by the Korean film Parasite in 2019, followed by the enormous success of the Korean TV series Squid Game in 2021 would seem to confirm this trend. It would seem that the continuing rate of diversification in the country has lead to an opening for films from different cultures.
But then perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, and that the box office success of The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One is not so surprising considering that both Miyazaki and Godzilla are both far from obscure in the US. (Considering the recent series of Godzilla films made in Hollywood, that character has pretty much become as much an American commodity these days as a Japanese one.) But as someone who grew up in San Francisco and has sought out and often loved foreign language films almost all my life, I hope that in the future Americans will get over their aversion to sub titles. At the very least, I hope sometime soon that there is a cable channel available in the US that only shows foreign language films. (When you consider how many versions of ESPN there are, you'd think there'd be a chance!).
