As many of you know, I’ve travelled to many places in Latin America over the last few years, mainly talking to Latin filmmakers about both the business and the craft of moviemaking. The most common question that comes up is why, given the size of the Latin population in the U.S., is there not a larger market for their films in our country? The answer is actually quite simple. Just as films from Colombia don’t typically travel to Mexico, and Mexican films don’t necessarily work in Argentina, we don’t have a single Latin culture in the U.S. It is a fragmented market with large, but distinct cultures. There is an available audience, but it’s not the reliable mass audience that people think it ought to be.
Not that I’m truly an expert on the subject, but last week, I was asked to be on Joe Torres’s show “Tiempo” on local WABC-TV to speak on the subject.
Updated 10/8/10: The folks at WABC, in their infinite wisdom, have removed all the streaming videos from their site prior to September. Oh, well. Their loss.
Very true. Now that more movies are made in Mexico thanks to tax incentives, the industry’s sights should focus on marketing and distribution against the major studios. Should a screen quota be enforced? Should production costs go down? This are interesting times, even if surviving them is getting harder.
Truly agree on “cannot fit all latinoamericans in the same bucket” … and the term “hispanic” is not really an identity for us either (vs. puertorican, colombian, mexican, etc). HOWEVER, I think the audience issue for latinoamerican films is beyond the different countries, but the fact that many of these movies are really art films (vs. commercial) … add the subtitles to them, and it makes it even harder for your typical moviegoer.