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British Film and Hollywood Essay

Rob Miller | Tuesday September 27, 2011

Categories: A Level, Eduqas (WJEC) A Level, WJEC A2, WJEC A2 Media Studies, WJEC AS, WJEC AS Media Studies, Film, British Film, Film Industry, Hollywood, Independent Film

Associated Resources

  • British Film and Hollywood Essay.doc

British Film has been dominated by Hollywood since WW1. Any essay that discusses UK Film has to reference the cultural and ideological dominance of the Hollywood Film Industry to such as point that many cinema goers often will never see a film in any other environment than a multiplex cinema. They may also fail to recognise that many other countries have very successful film industries - this reflects a concept called the Hollywood Hegemony. Many Hollywood films are able to synergise two compatible products e.g. Star Trek / Angels and Demons are both a computer game and a feature film.

British Film can be defined on a number or levels (Culturally and Institutionally) e.g. commercially successful British Films like Slumdog Millionaire are only so because they are distributed by 20th Century Fox. Films like The Boat That Rocked are only commercially successful because they are distributed by Universal Studios. Independent films like Shifty and Looking for Eric can be categorised as British using Institutional


Cultural definitions. The UK Film Council often claim that films like Harry Potter are British and proudly incorporate them into their statistics but the key problem is that these films are distributed by Hollywood Studios like Warners / Parmount / Sony / 20th Century Fox which means much of the profit for these films is not ploughed back into the British Film Industry. For example, the most commercially successful ‘British’ film of the last 20 years is The Full Monty but this film was distributed by Fox Searchlight (the independent arm of 20th Century Fox.

American audiences often buy into the cultural stereotypes (exaggerated, hyper real representations) offered by many British films typified by the key collaboration between Working Title and Universal Studios. This successful collaboration has raised the profile and reputation of the British Film Industry with...





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