[Jason Vines]

The entertainment media of the United States judge the performances of movies by how much money they earn domestically. They pay no attention to international grosses. But, today, movies have become so expensive they cannot turn large profits from domestic intake alone. They must achieve overseas success in order for studios to get returns on their investments. As one of my own professors, Dr. Harvey Feigenbaum, says in "Hollywood: The Bottom Line" (which originally appeared in the French periodical Le Monde):

Dr. Harvey Feigenbaum said:

In the late 1980s the industry was forced to internationalise. Hollywood moved from the industrial cluster model to geographical dispersion, which came to dominate during the era of liberal globalisation. The decline of the studio system accelerated this. With television enjoying a monopoly of everyday entertainment, cinema attendance became a special, and rarer, event. The costs of production and marketing reached levels where the failure of a single film could bankrupt a studio, and currently only one film in 10 is a commercial success. Risk is now the defining characteristic of the industry. By the end of the 1990s flexible specialisation was no longer enough. Costs of films were so high that even success on the domestic US market was not enough to assure profitability. International sales, which once had been merely extra revenue, became crucial to the financial success of a movie.

(Emphasis mine.)

Because movies cannot become successes without international markets, for the American media to natter incessantly about domestic totals is both myopic and misleading. It takes Americans' conviction they are the only ones who matter to obscenely inaccurate and ridiculous levels.

American entertainment reporters need to extract their heads from their posteriors and start caring about what people outside their own country think of films.

[Rorschach]

Why does the BBC always give monetary amounts in "Dollars American", no matter what part of the world it involves?

[Cymro]

Actually it gives them in GBP too, especially here, unless you're catching some sort of different feed to what we Brits get. The only regular exception being crude oil which is always $/barrel