In its economic heyday of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a curious phenomenon of Hollywood celebrities showing up in Japanese commercials: Arnold Schwarzenegger hawking instant noodles, Harrison Ford pitching Kirin beer. To this day, Tommy Lee Jones still appears in a long-standing series advertising canned coffee.
You won’t, however, see much of the current generation of Hollywood stars — no Dwayne Johnson promoting Toyotas, no Ryan Reynolds plugging energy drinks. That’s not just because Japanese firms don’t have the market budget they once had — Johnny Depp recently advertised Asahi beer — but because of a growing, often ignored fact: In Japan, Hollywood isn’t the draw it used to be.
The U.S. share of the world’s third-biggest box office has been dropping for years, a phenomenon that predates the pandemic and has only been aggravated by it. Four of the top five grossing movies this year are domestic hits, with Hollywood’s only representative the ’80s throwback "Top Gun: Maverick."
