Four takeaways from Hollywood's boycott of Russia

The boycott is largely symbolic for Hollywood—but will nevertheless take a toll because of its target.

Russia isn’t Hollywood’s largest foreign market—it ranked ninth in 2019 for foreign box-office revenue, far behind the likes of China and Japan—but America has long inspired Russia’s efforts to build its own entertainment industry. “There’s always been a fascination in Russia with Hollywood,” Rachel Morley, an associate Russian-cinema professor at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, explained. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to create its own “cinema city,” she said; the state studied Hollywood’s model and tried to emulate it at home. Though Soviet films began looking a lot like American ones—Morley points to Soviet musicals drawing heavily from Busby Berkeley’s—the project failed, and no such production hub was ever created. Hollywood’s current rejection must sting, she noted, for a film industry that has long taken cues from American cinema. “When big Hollywood movies are not released,” she said, “Russians feel [the weight of] that.”