Buried in the mounds of juicy, prurient gossip contained in the Sony email hack (not leak: hack*) was this little nugget about the studio's view of White House Down:
It’s pretty hard to "avoid American-centrism" when promoting a film called "White House Down" http://t.co/iUYOEW6OaC pic.twitter.com/EX7NpRL8C7
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) December 14, 2014
As you may remember, White House Down was the second of two movies about the White House being captured by terrorists to be released in 2013, the first being Olympus Has Fallen. It was Dante's Peak to Volcano, Deep Impact to Armageddon. Whereas Olympus Has Fallen was a rather paint-by-numbers action-adventure film (Die Hard but in the White House) that featured a well-designed and occasionally plausible threat (North Korean commandos take the White House in the film's thrilling opening act), White House Down lived up to Sony's effort to "avoid American-centrism" by having its antagonists be a bunch of white supremacists angry that the White House was, like, trying to achieve world peace, man. They just weren't down with president Jamie Foxx's groovy vision of the world.
Shockingly, the movie about North Korean commandos taking the White House did better at the domestic box office than the movie about white supremacists taking out a black president. Overseas, however, the results flipped: White House Down grossed more than twice what Olympus Has Fallen grossed outside of North America.** As a result, White House Down ended up outgrossing Olympus Has Fallen. So this proves Sony right, yes?
Well, maybe. It's hard to say. One could construct a plausible case that White House Down did better overseas because it had bigger stars in Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, and foreign audiences are more likely to gravitate toward star-driven productions. You could construct the same case with regard to GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and its sequel GI Joe: Retaliation.
Retaliation grossed over $250 million overseas, $100 million more than its predecessor. Retaliation had much bigger star power: there's a reason Bruce Willis was featured so heavily in the advertising campaign despite being a bit player in the flick. He puts butts in seats in foreign markets. Of course, it's not that simple. GI Joe: Retaliation was a far more patriotic film than its predecessor. Whereas Rise of Cobra envisioned the GI Joes—to previous generations, "a real American hero"—as United Nations-style blue helmets, the sequel brought the team back to its roots: rough and tumble United States soldiers who use the code "1776" to access their gun safes. Ooh Rah!
To use a slightly more current example, consider Interstellar's massive success overseas. Christopher Nolan's latest has grossed $455 million overseas thus far, compared to just $166.8 million at home. This despite the fact that, as a recent Jacobin headline accurately puts it, "Interstellar celebrates American-style frontier expansion and retrograde masculinity."***
It's worth considering that this is what some overseas audiences like about American filmmaking. I once interviewed John Milius, a George Lucas contemporary (they attended USC around the same time) and director of 1984's Red Dawn. He told me that Hollywood was making a mistake when it shied away from America's natural sensibility: brash, bold, and brave. The rest of the world isn't interested in seeing America tone itself down. "The only thing they like about us is that we used to be innocent butt-kickers," he said. "It was a part of American society that was just pure energy."
Needless to say, I doubt Milius will be working for Sony any time soon.
*I have to say, I'm more or less with Aaron Sorkin on this. The difference between the celebrity nude photo hack and the Sony hack is extremely slight. The delight in both is basically pornographic in nature: leering over a celebrity's body is probably worse than poring through their private correspondence, but it's on the same spectrum. I guess that makes me a bit of a hypocrite for writing this post. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
**Olympus Has Fallen was still the bigger success, despite grossing less, because its budget was less than half that of White House Down.
***They say that like it's a bad thing.