A combination of millions of people with production skills in California, and a huge domestic market able to spend billions has fuelled one of America’s biggest exports - TV & Movies. They’re not the biggest exports in dollar amounts, petroleum brings in almost 50 times more, but they give America something else apart from money - soft power via an outsized place in global cultural consciousness.
What happens when that sharply recedes? Soft power isn’t as easily counted as the size of aircraft carriers or the number of missiles, but its effects are real.
Sort of but it will be because of the rise of India and China’s film industry and even then, those two industries have shoe-horned themselves into a stereotype for their films with musical numbers and party-approved only content, respectively.
One of the most difficult barriers to culture soft power is language. America capitalized early on that English is the most common tongue to communicate in across the world. So the barrier to introduce new media is easier.
That being said, Hollywood adapts to what the people want. Have you noticed that fewer blockbusters are singularly “America! Fuck yeah!” focused? More and more films from Hollywood have foreign, English as a second/third language actors, exotic foreign locations, and are less likely to contain villains of specific countries?
In short, Hollywood’s soft power is changing to be liked more in other cultures, but until large film industries like China and India are less domestic-focused, it isn’t going to be dethroned anytime soon.
One thing I think a lot of people don’t realize is that a non-insignificant amount of Hollywood content is produced in Canada due to their generous tax breaks