CM’s Reviews > Film History: An Introduction > Status Update

For most countries, the best rewards lay in building service facilities for international production (especially Hollywood’s) and making a few
successful domestic films each year. The highest-quality ones could find exposure on the growing festival circuit, which might lead to theatrical sales.

Whatever the strategy, the economic outcome was the same. At the end of the 2000s, nearly all European filmmakers had failed to beat Hollywood in their domestic markets, win audiences in adjacent territories, or expand their niche in the United States. A cynic might conclude that the millions of euros spent on thousands of European films were wasted. Yet Hollywood had long proven that quantity boosted quality.

Box-office income surpassed a billion dollars in 2010, and
Russia became one of the world’s top ten film markets(cf: only approx 9 million in 1999).

This quote is just gold...

When Paramount Pictures asked Francis Ford Coppola to
make a film based on the novel The Godfather, he was in
despair. “They want me to direct this hunk of trash,” he
told his father. “I don’t want to do it. I want to do art
films.”