The Distribution of Italian Cinema in the United States

1. Introduction

This article will address the dissemination of the country’s cinema in American theatres, referring in particular to a handful of films that managed to penetrate the US market. The first part provides a map of theatrical circulation dynamics over the past few decades, offering a historical perspective on the economic and cultural distribution processes of Italian cinema in the United States. In the second, we focus on quantitative data to examine how many Italian films were distributed in American theatres, and which ones, over the past ten years, as well as their box office takings, the length of time they remained in theatres, and the kinds of circulation strategies adopted. Specifically, we focus on the two auteurs who have gained the most visibility in the USA thanks to the distribution of their work between 2008 and 2017: Paolo Sorrentino and Luca Guadagnino. We identify the promotion strategies of Italian cinema through a study of the production and distribution mechanisms for the most widely circulated films by these auteurs: La grande bellezza/The Great Beauty (2013) and Youth (2015) by Sorrentino, and Io sono l’amore/I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash by Guadagnino. Together, they define a distribution model which, while functional in the present, is intimately connected to the theatrical circulation procedures for foreign films in the USA that were perfected in a more distant past.

The history of Italian cinema’s circulation in the USA appears somewhat marginal, in view of box office takings, or the reserve that the American public has historically demonstrated toward the ‘foreign film’: the victim of a non-capillary dissemination across the country and relegated to non-mainstream distribution channels. To underestimate the role played by theatrical distribution would nevertheless be to anchor ourselves to a reductive image of the phenomenon, prescriptively verifying the conditions that enable the visibility and accessibility of certain products rather than others. Beginning with an analysis of box office data it is instead possible to identify a “culture of circulation” of content, and not merely its “transmission”. Indeed, theatrical distribution represents only a small part of a much larger process of content circulation today, which, along with the plethora of other more or less ‘institutional’ forms of dissemination (TV, the VHS and then DVD and Blu-ray markets, digital platforms of various types), must account for the increasingly large means of informal film consumption. However, is also true that the film theatre is fundamental to guaranteeing the economic and cultural life cycles of every single film. It serves not only as a point of departure for a product’s marketing, in view of its subsequent transformation and diffusion on other formats, but also – and especially for the film’s trajectory in the USA – as a space in which the often-unresolved dialectic between the national dimension of our cinema and its international vocation plays out. In other words, the movie theatre shapes, on the one hand, its capacity to become integrated in a global distribution circuit, and on the other, its participation in an international cultural identity of cinema. The latter, of course, is often sanctioned by means of prizes and involvement in film festivals like Venice and Cannes, in Europe, or Toronto and Sundance on the American continent.

Examining therefore the production of the four, aforementioned films by Sorrentino and Guadagnino, all of which were presented at international festivals, we seek to study the reasons for their success in relation to the contrasting reception that these works found in Italy. In this regard, we take into account quantitative sources relating to admissions and box office takings in the United States. First, we aim is to relate the national stereotypes conveyed partially in these works (the cultural imaginary of Italy, its places, its values, its film style) to the desire to market products that are as globalized as possible (thanks in particular to international stars or fruitful co-production systems with foreign countries). The second objective is to observe how this dialectic is linked on the level of content and film style, in a similarly contradictory way, to the attempt to distribute these films initially in a system that is typical to mainstream cinema, and then to persistent independent and niche distribution channels even in the new millennium. Evidently we refer to the arthouse film circuit, with which a reflection on the fate of any foreign cinema, thus including Italian film, must necessarily begin.

 

2. Italian Cinema in the USA: A Historical Perspective

American cinemas began to programme European films (especially British productions) as early as the 1930s. The ‘foreign film’ often benefitted from double bills, it being included sometimes as the second film in the schedules of theatres like the Radio City Music Hall or the Rivoli Theatre in New York, or equivalent spaces in other metropolises, like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington. It is more common practice, however, to locate the most important expansion of the foreign film in the American market during the decades that followed World War II, alongside the crisis in the Hollywood system that followed the Paramount Decision in 1948. The end of the vertically integrated system, one of the necessary preconditions for a recovery of the “lost audience”, resulted in the creation of a new exhibition practice (that of arthouse cinemas) and an independent distribution system. European post-neorealist and modernist productions provided the most fitting way to guarantee a different experience of film consumption for audiences that, while doubtless ‘cultured’ and educated, were moreover eager to reaffirm their own social distinction through the acquisition of cultural capital.

The art house circuit saw exponential growth in the first two decades that followed World War II, with the number of movie theatres climbing from 60 in 1950 to around 400 in 1962. At the same time, the space of independent distribution also grew: of the companies active in 1959, 40 were directly involved in the dissemination of foreign films, with some of these – Janus Films, Joseph E. Levine Embassy Pictures, Trans Lux Distributing, Embassy and Lopert – involved in particular in the promotion of Italian cinema. This development in the circulation of alternative cinema was proportional to the growth in the number of foreign films programmed: films that were distinct on an aesthetic level as well as for their domestic industrial context, those not by chance framed later in academic film studies via the potentially problematic term ‘art cinema’. Nevertheless, as the rich literature in this area has illustrated, the artistic categorization of foreign films – especially in the USA – cannot be built only on their textual properties or on the institutional or production apparatus that sustain them, but they must also – perhaps above all – be defined in terms of the specificities of the spectator’s experience in the theatre. Indeed, the foreign film gains its cultural status precisely for its affiliation to a niche market, which exists for both historic and geographic reasons: it began in New York, before moving to a limited number of North-American cities, and it always tried, with limited success, to expand and reach ever larger audience shares.

From this perspective, it is not surprising that the fortunes of this distribution system began with the 1946 screening of Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945), the first non-American film to make more than one million dollars at the box office. But it was particularly between the second half of the ’50s and the first of the ’60s that Italian cinema’s role in creating cultural capital and boosting alternative film theatres became clear. Taking a look at the box office takings of the foreign films distributed before 1972 (Table 1), Italian films appear among the highest ranks. During these years, the presence of Italian cinema in the American market was concrete: in 1961, the year that saw the greatest expansion of Italian cinema in the USA, 116 of the 875 films distributed in that country were Italian productions. In New York alone, from June 1959 to May 31^st, 1961, 45 of the 1331 programming weeks of foreign films in arthouse theatres were taken up by Italian films. As evidence of the familiarity of Italian national (and predominantly auteur) cinema beyond box office alone, and particularly in terms of cultural impact, in the same years the Academy introduced the award category for the “Best Foreign Language Film” in 1956, with Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954) taking the first victory.

Box office data together with the role played by the Oscars in the promotion of Italian cinema in the USA nevertheless oblige us to evaluate more prudently the complexity of the distribution strategies used for Italian cinema during the era of the art houses. Fellini evidently provides one of the more emblematic examples that views the USA a privileged space to create an international auteur, and to globalize a national film heritage. The American success of La dolce vita was fed in part by the American critical press and its distribution, after an Oscar victory, in mainstream theatres. This demonstrates that even in the 1960s there was the desire to expand this market share and aspire to a much larger commercial gain, one that transcends a minority audience of a more intellectual extraction. Furthermore, the presence of Vittorio De Sica’s films in the top rankings of foreign cinema in the USA in those years can often be justified via the exploitation of the star presence of Sophia Loren, or in terms of the co-productions between Italy and other nations. Such distribution models attest not only to the search for a more international idea of Italian cinema, but also the fundamental ambiguity of a niche market that mistakenly seeks, at all costs, to define itself in opposition to the rules of the market, and, with its clear favouritism of ‘auteur’ rather than ‘actor’ cinema, to a non-mainstream industrial model.

Looking more closely, the stigmatizing binary division of ‘art’ from ‘industry’, or of the independent market from the mainstream one, no longer seems functional – at least in the terms used historically. As has been observed elsewhere, as a critical and institutional category ‘art cinema’ is at best impure, elastic, and naturally international and cosmopolitan, considering its aim to locate audiences beyond its own national confines. And the spectator of art film was just as impure, even in 1960s America. As Barbara Wilinski rightly notes in her study of arthouse cinema, the phenomenon of independent film exhibition in the second post-war period is the result of a primarily commercial rather than cultural operation. This is an element that any such study must face, in order to historicize a category – that of the foreign film – that was never static but constantly shifting in relation to the social, industrial and cultural context in America. Or rather, in New York, which, unlike Boston for instance, has never been the urban embodiment of ‘high culture’ tastes, but rather a place where artistic prerogatives have always been intimately connected to a commercial logic, providing an outlet for ‘middlebrow’ or ‘midcult’ forms of consumption, in precisely the mid-1960s. Not by chance, these were stigmatized at the same time in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald.

This is an important aspect as it helps us to understand more clearly the contraction of the market for foreign (and therefore also Italian) cinema in the USA from the end of the 1960s onward. What took place in the second post-war period was a transformation of tastes not only for a restricted circle of consumers, but one that expanded laterally across the generation of the so-called ‘baby-boomers’, therefore spanning the entire American film industry. From the 1970s, the elements of form and content that were typical of modern European cinema were absorbed by Hollywood production too, as is reflected in the birth of New Hollywood. The beginning of the 1980s saw two changes: on the one hand, a fall in the number of independent distributors, who were principally involved in the promotion of new American ‘indie’ cinema; on the other, the involvement of the major conglomerates in the distribution of niche films. This resulted from the creation of a series of ‘classic divisions’ of the majors, that were tasked with distributing that slice of American cinema (once the work of independent producers), such as United Artists Classics, Orion Classic, 20th Century- Fox International Classic, and Sony Pictures Classic from the end of the 1980s. These divisions were often responsible for the distribution of foreign movies – though Italian cinema appears only marginally, at least during that decade.

The 1990s saw a complete re-structuring of the entire cinema system, with a progressive reduction in arthouse theatres in urban centres and the birth of the multiplexes. In this context, the absorption of foreign film within the distribution strategies of the mainstream circuit appears even more evident. From this perspective, the presence of Italian cinema was in fact more significant, as demonstrated by attendance data (see Table 2). Two Italian films, Il postino and La vita è bella/Life is Beautiful (Italian cinema’s greatest commercial success in the USA) are the two highest grossing foreign films in the nineties, and a further two films – Nuovo cinema Paradiso/Cinema Paradiso and Mediterraneo – are also among the top twenty highest performances at the box office. It is important, however, not to misinterpret this data, for instance comparing it with the almost laughable percentages of Italian cinema’s overall success during the same period (see Table 3). Italian cinema’s penetration of the US market was based entirely on the success of single films, released following successes at the Oscars, and thanks in particular to the distribution strategies of Miramax: an approach to foreign film promotion to that differed to that of Sony Pictures Classic (together these were the most active companies in the distribution of foreign films in that decade). The latter took a greater interest in a more traditional form of international and especially European art cinema (with a particular emphasis on the French and German markets). Miramax, rather, selected those foreign films that fit a merchandizing model with different characteristics, in line with the Weinstein brothers’ decade-long effort to transform the North American market into ‘indiewood’.

In his article on the fortunes of La vita è bella in the United States, Paul McDonald has described carefully the distribution mechanisms as well as the cultural and cinema-industrial decisions that defined Miramax’s promotion of Italian Cinema, with the objective of uniting the cultural capital traditionally associated to the consumption of foreign cinema and the economic capital to be gained from the largest possible distribution circuit for Hollywood cinema. In other words, the company pursued, on the one hand, marketing strategies that had been perfected in previous years for exploitation cinema, and on the other, the meticulous construction of the film’s reputation through the festival circuit and the critical response. The aim of this process was to disseminate a non-American product – albeit one whose its foreignness is somewhat masked, by adopting the style of contemporary international cinema and concealing of those elements that refer directly to Italian national cinema – as widely as possible (the number of screens when La vita è bella was first released in October 1998, i.e. 221, was tripled after the Oscar nomination, and doubled again after its victory). The results were like nothing seen by Italian cinema before, though ultimately not as striking as one might believe. As Perren observes, the impact of this operation must be downsized in relation to the standard box office takings of mainstream cinema in the USA at that same time.

However, as the progressive contraction of Miramax’s economic successes demonstrate (the company closed in 2005), the attempt to introduce a foreign product that was re-shaped to fit the needs of a non-niche market into the US’s mainstream circuit incurred a business risk that was not always sustainable. Indeed, this model was never repeated in the same terms after the 1990s.

At the dawn of the new millennium, the Italian films distributed in the United States therefore appear to be increasingly similar to other contemporary European cinema. As Thomas Elsaesser has written, these reveal the repression of traditional distinctive characteristics: the national authorial dimension, and the a priori appreciation of realism. At the same time, however, to maintain some of the distinctive traits that defined European art cinema’s international vocation historically remained a necessary prerequisite, in the attempt to carve out a space in the continent’s market. Without this element, it is difficult to explain the contradictory nature, on the level of film typology as much as that of its circulation modes, of Italian cinema in the USA in more recent years.

 

3. Sorrentino vs. Guadagnino: A Comparison of Two Distribution Models

Comparing the 2008-2017 period to the decade before, it is immediately clear that the quantity of Italian cinema distributed in the United States decreases significantly. Taking, for instance, the rankings of the top European films distributed in the United States in terms of admissions (see Table 4), the first Italian film is found only in the 112^th place: Io sono l’amore by Luca Guadagnino, which sold 634,406 tickets. This is followed, in 157^th and 159^th positions, by two films by Paolo Sorrentino: La grande bellezza, 321,770 tickets, and Youth, 317,378. Italian cinema’s (already marginal) theatrical distribution therefore appears limited, in recent years, to a series of particularly appreciated auteurs at an international level. Examining the data more closely, this same dynamic categorizes the circulation of Italian cinema abroad generally: the most exportable products, unlike the products of other European cinemas in the top rankings, seems generally connected to the category of auteur art cinema.

By taking a look at the top 25 most successful Italian films in the 2008-2017 period (cf. Table 5), once again in terms of theatrical admissions, we can reconstruct a series of very clear tendencies. In addition to the four films made by Guadagnino and Sorrentino mentioned in opening, among the highest ranks we find, once again, almost exclusively auteur films. Matteo Garrone is represented with three films Gomorra/Gomorrah (2008, 5^th place), Il racconto dei racconti/Tale of Tales (2015, 18^th) and Reality (2012, 20^th), and Nanni Moretti has two films in the classification: Habemus Papam/We Have a Pope (2011, 7^th place) and Mia madre/My Mother (2015, 12^th). There are moreover another two films by Sorrentino: Il Divo (2008, 13^th) and This Must Be the Place (2011, 15^th). Aside from the case of Gianni Di Gregorio – who is represented in the list with the two films that he directed, Pranzo di ferragosto/Mid-August Lunch (2008, 8^th) and Gianni e le donne/The Salt of Life (2011, 10^th), both of which can be considered comedies – the other 23 films in the ranking are auteur films. Further restricting our study to the top 5 films in terms of box office takings in the USA, during the same decade (2008-2017, see Table 6), we can identify two quite distinct types of film. The first is represented by Garrone’s Gomorra and Sorrentino’s two films La grande bellezza and Youth, for which domestic box-office takings are broadly proportional to the non-Italian European takings. Specifically, the total takings for Garrone’s film can be divided equally between Italian (49%) and European spectators (45%) – American takings equate to only 6% of the total – and the same pattern is repeated for Sorrentino’s films. The Italian takings for La grande bellezza represent 41% of the total, versus 47% non-national, European tickets – in this case, American spectators constitute 12% of the total. For Youth, the proportion is more inclined to European ticket sales (57%) than Italian ones (32% – the lowest percentage of the top five) – and in this case, too, American box-office takings are around 11% of the total. Thus for this first type of film, relating to the second, third and fifth highest takings in the USA, American spectators constitute only a small part – between 6% and 12% – of the global ticket sales.

The second type is categorized by Luca Guadagnino’s two films, Io sono l’amore (first place) and A Bigger Splash (fourth). In this case, the proportions of local ticket sales are quite decisively inverted. Here, Italian takings contribute very little to the total – respectively 3% and 4% – while the proportion of international ticket sales increases significantly: 53% of the viewers of Io sono l’amore, and 63% for A Bigger Splash were in Europe (outside of Italy). American ticket sales, on the other hand, constitute 44% for the first case and 33% in the second. This data, which is notably much higher for Guadagnino’s films than for those of the first type, therefore reflects a greater proportional relevance of North-American spectators. This by no means implies that the other category of film is less interesting. It is curious, rather, that – aside from Gomorra – the two types can be divided equally by specific auteur, to the extent that we could potentially speak of two defined, individual models: the case of Sorrentino and the case of Guadagnino. In the following paragraphs we analyse these two comparatively.

First, it should be noted that Sorrentino’s two films have a series of elements in common as regards their production and distribution. La grande bellezza is a majority Italian European co-production (Italy-France), as too is Youth (Italy-France-UK-Switzerland). Both films were moreover presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, in May 2013 and 2015 respectively. They were distributed in Italian theatres more or less contemporaneously, but reached the USA only in the winter (November 2013 and December 2015). As regard distribution strategies, we can note some initial differences. La grande bellezza was distributed in the USA by the aforementioned historical distributor of art cinema Janus Film, in collaboration with Criterion. The film sold 321,770 tickets and made $2,852,400 ($255,164 in the opening weekend) over its 19-week run, reaching a maximum of 52 screens at the height of its distribution. After this success, two years later the second of Sorrentino’s films to be distributed in the United States was acquired by Fox Searchlights, and broadly reached a similar level (317,378 viewers and $2,598,509, of which only $78,085 in its opening weekend), but through a significantly higher number of screens (149, over a 12-week run).

From a purely quantitative perspective, the two films had relatively similar audience numbers and total box office takings. However, the average taking per copy of La grande bellezza was $54,854, while the average for Youth was almost a third, at $17,439. The greater investment on behalf of Fox Searchlights therefore corresponds to a proportionally smaller economic return, with respect to what Janus and Criterion achieved for the earlier film. The greater impact of La grande bellezza in the USA is doubtless due to a series of factors, the most important of which  was certainly the film’s success at the Academy Awards, having won Best Film in a Foreign Language. Indeed, as well as guaranteeing a longer run in theatres (19 vs 12 weeks), the Oscar enabled a second release of La grande bellezza during the spring of the following year. As Marco Cucco has observed, the majority of takings in US theatres took place after the announcement of an Oscar nomination – takings increase by 90.8% on the previous weekend – and, to a slightly lesser extent, after the victory at the ceremony – an increase of 84.6%. Though it was filmed in the English language, with a cast that was for the most part Anglo-American (or English speaking), and though it could count on the success of the previous film by the same director – something likely decisive in Fox Searchlights’ decision to acquire its distribution rights – Youth was unable to achieve, proportionally, the success of La grande bellezza. What remains evident in the analysis of these two cases is how, with an analogous production model but divergent distribution models, the percentage of American spectators of the total for the two films was, broadly, equivalent: as mentioned earlier, between 11 and 12%.

Turning to the analysis of Guadagnino’s films, the differences in the distribution strategies of the two films in question appear even more evident. It is interesting to analyse once again the continuities in the shift from one film to the next of the same auteur. Both Io sono l’amore and A Bigger Splash are entirely national productions, that see the involvement of Italian production companies with the support of national cultural institutions (MiBACT, the ministry for culture) as well as local ones (film commissions). As in the case of Sorrentino in Cannes, both of Guadagnino’s films were presented in competition at an international film festival: Venice, in 2009 and 2015 respectively.

After its presence in various international festivals, I am Love was released in Italy in March 2010, precisely six months after its premiere at Venice. The film’s international distribution moreover began immediately, reaching American theatres by June of the same year. It was acquired in the USA by Magnolia Pictures, which initially distributed the film via a limited release, before reaching a maximum of 166 in the seventh week of its run. It remained in theatres for 25 weeks, making, from 634,406 tickets sold, a total of $5,004,648. This was the largest box office taking for an Italian film in the USA during the 2008-2017 decade. Compared with the standard theatrical numbers of European auteur cinema, this is a significant result, built over a six-month time span in which the film was distributed in varying numbers of copies across the USA, in a kind of promotional tour. During a first phase, it was on limited release between New York and Los Angeles (in its opening weekend it made $248,120, more or less the same as La grande bellezza), but only in a second phase (broadly between the third and eighth weeks), its distribution grew. It then slowly decreased in the final weeks of its run, circulating through only a handful of copies (between the 18^th and 25^th weeks).

The second film, A Bigger Splash, was released in Italian theatres in November 2015, two months after its premiere at Venice. It was not released in the USA until the May of the following year, following a wide European circulation both in theatres and at festivals. Its distribution rights were acquired by Fox Searchlights – who had previously been involved in the theatrical circulation of Sorrentino’s film Youth. Already this information points to Fox Searchlight’s strategy, i.e. to reach the segment of the market interested in Italian film. The American distributor was evidently attracted both by the excellent first results gained by the previous productions of the Italian auteurs, and by the international awards and recognition their films had gained. Indeed, La grande bellezza and I Am Love were nominated both for Academy Awards (for Best Film in a Foreign Language and Best Achievement in Costume Design), and British Academy Film Awards (both for the Best Foreign Language Film) – won by Sorrentino’s film on both occasions. With the same aim of replicating the success of the two preceding films, Fox Searchlights distributed Youth and A Bigger Splash, which, not by chance, were both shot in English with an international cast. For Guadagnino’s film, too, the distribution strategies radically differed from the director’s previous film. Indeed, the American distributor decided once again to double the maximum number of copies of the film (from 166 for I Am Love to a maximum of 378, in the fourth week) and decrease the total number of weeks of its release. The prolonged distribution over 25 weeks, which had proved fruitful for the 2009 release, was completely overturned: A Bigger Splash’s run was concentrated to nine weeks. The progression of box office is coherent with the number of theatres, creating an easily-interpretable cause and effect model. The takings for the first weekend were $114,419, practically half of what I Am Love achieved. The total ticket sales were also around half: at the end of nine weeks, it totalled $1,982,505. This was a decent result: though it did not replicate the vast American success of I Am Love, it nonetheless broadly followed the success of the film’s international circulation. American ticket sales equate to 33% of the total for A Bigger Splash. This is a high proportion, particularly when compared – along with the 44% for I Am Love – to those gained by Sorrentino’s two films.

 

4. So Far, So Near

The distribution tendencies of contemporary Italian cinema in the United States have a different, if not problematic, connotation in relation to the historical trajectories that we defined above. As well as the unyielding evidence of the decreasing proportional impact of Italian cinema on the American foreign film market, it is striking that between 2007 and 2016 the Italian films released in US theatres reached a total of 2.3 million spectators (a quarter of which saw I Am Love). These changes, however, are evident not only from a quantitative perspective, but also from a qualitative one. In purely industrial terms, the way that Italian auteur cinema has been distributed over the last decade is a far cry from the promotion and distribution strategies used in previous years: not only in terms of a briefer average run in theatres compared to the past, but above all for a new approach to distribution shared by the cases analysed here. While, on the one hand, we witness the continued presence of a number of independent agents involved in the distribution of the first films of Sorrentino and Guadagnino – Janus Film, Criterion and Magnolia Pictures very evidently represent an idea of European auteur cinema – on the other, Fox Searchlight Pictures intervenes directly to distribute the second films: a giant American company engaged in distributing European and American independent cinema, with characteristics that are not necessarily related to arthouse film. However, this is not all. The cases that we have studied here appear to indicate the tendency to present a kind of Italian cinema to the American market that has an unfixed identity. At times they embody nationality clearly, at least in terms of content; at others, they utilize blatantly international (if not American) characteristics. From a stylistic point of view, the films correspond to the trend of non-blockbuster international cinema that is nevertheless distributed in mainstream circuits; at others they reveal themselves to be the possessive custodians of a series of distinctive traits which clearly invoke the great tradition of modern, especially Italian, cinema.

On the one hand, the themes, settings and intertextual references of La grande bellezza and I Am Love represent a process of cultural legitimation for the American spectator, that still draws from a precise idea of national cinema. On the other, both Youth and A Bigger Splash seem to complicate this historical paradigm: not only as they were filmed in English or with international actors, but they are also characterized to a lesser extent by a cultural element of ‘Italianness’. Taking, as a final example, the next films of the directors studied here, Sorrentino’s Loro (2018) and Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017), this point can only be amplified. The former restricts his themes in comparison to the open international-ness of his previous film, thereby returning to the spirit of La grande bellezza. He nevertheless has complicated, meanwhile, the typical paradigm of ‘European Art Cinema’ by introducing pop and post-modern elements and characters. The latter instead expanded further the universality toward which A Bigger Splash tended. While maintaining a setting that was very specifically located in Italy – though the ‘Somewhere in Northern Italy’ that begins Call Me by Your Name internationally redefines the national borders – Guadagnino constructs a kind of ‘Stateless’ film, spoken in English, but also featuring Italian, French, even German, and not by chance purchased for the American market by Sony Pictures Classics. The film remains fixedly within its genre, but proved to be a (relatively, for an arthouse film) large success with audiences: it took $18 million in the American box office alone. The cultural and industrial hybridity of this kind of Italian film makes makes it, as we have seen, the most exportable model at present, but it moreover represents an evolution and a complication of the classic foreign film distribution strategies employed by Sony and Miramax during the 1990s. The directions and the fortunes of this new, multiform ‘circulation culture’ will therefore be oriented, in the future, by the capacity of the national film industry to adapt to the changes of the new, global, distribution system.

This article was already published in «Comunicazioni Sociali – Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies» (n. 3/2018), Special Issue: “The International Circulation of European Cinema in the Digital Age”, edited by Damiano Garofalo, Dom Holdaway and Massimo Scaglioni.