"Offshoring the Audience"

The movie business is booming abroad precisely because Hollywood is making pictures for the world market —at the expense of customers in America, where, not surprisingly, business is tanking. It's that hoariest of economic clichés, a zero-sum game.
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If France makes movies for the French, and America makes movies for the world, who's left to make movies for America?
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For decades the tacit transatlantic understanding about film has gone roughly like this: America sends France movies, and France sends America theory. French movies, brilliant though they can be, tend not to make much impact at American theaters, but French theory —like a proliferating non-native plant—has driven out any domestic attempt at a poetics of American film.