A panel of producers at Filmart this week said what the industry has been circling around for months: international co-production isn't a strategy for expansion anymore. It's survival. With AI throwing production models into uncertainty and box office returns harder to predict than ever, the days of a single studio writing a $200 million check and hoping for the best are functionally over.
The panel — featuring producer Peter Chan, director Anthony Chen, and former Academy president Janet Yang — didn't sugarcoat it. "Those days of the blockbusters are gone," one panelist said, acknowledging what the tentpole-driven studio system has been unwilling to admit publicly: the math doesn't work anymore. Not when production costs keep climbing, not when audience behavior is this fragmented, and not when AI tools are simultaneously promising cost savings and threatening to upend every assumption about how films get made.
Co-production has always been about risk mitigation — split the financing, split the distribution rights, expand the potential audience across multiple territories. But what's shifted is the urgency. It's no longer just a smart play for mid-budget films trying to punch above their weight. It's becoming the default for projects that would have been solo studio bets five years ago. The blockbuster model assumed you could spend big, market bigger, and count on a global audience showing up opening weekend. That assumption is dead. Audiences are staying home. Streaming has trained them to wait. And the few films that do break through are increasingly unpredictable — not the franchises studios can plan around.
AI's role in this shift is still murky, which is why it dominated conversation at Filmart even as nobody could quite articulate what it means yet. The promise is efficiency: faster pre-visualization, cheaper VFX, automated post-production workflows. The threat is displacement: if AI can handle tasks that used to require entire teams, what happens to the labor force that makes films? And if studios can cut costs with AI, does that make them more willing to take risks on original IP — or does it just mean they'll keep making the same franchises with smaller budgets and smaller crews?
What the Filmart panel made clear is that co-production is one of the few models that hedges against all of this uncertainty. If a studio can't predict whether audiences will show up, it helps to have partners in multiple territories sharing the downside. If AI is going to disrupt production pipelines, it helps to have collaborators who bring different technical infrastructure and expertise. If the box office is unreliable, it helps to have pre-sold distribution in markets where your partners have established footholds. It's not a glamorous strategy. It's defensive. But it's the strategy that makes sense when the old playbook is clearly broken.
Hollywood has been here before — the rise of international co-production in the 1960s and 70s was a direct response to the collapse of the studio system and the need to access foreign financing. What's different now is the speed of the disruption. Emerging markets are building co-production infrastructure faster than Hollywood can adapt, and producers are launching regional production companies that don't need Hollywood's blessing to operate. The power dynamic is shifting. Co-production used to mean a Hollywood studio bringing in foreign partners to help finance a fundamentally American project. Now it increasingly means international producers bringing in Hollywood partners to access distribution — but the creative and financial control is more evenly split.
The panelists at Filmart weren't mourning the death of the blockbuster. They were describing the new normal: smaller bets, shared risk, more collaboration, less certainty. Studios are pouring money into AI infrastructure hoping it will solve the cost problem, but the real solution is structural. International co-production spreads risk across borders, across markets, across tax incentives and subsidies that no single territory can offer alone. It's not sexy. It's not the story Hollywood wants to tell about itself. But it's the model that survives when the blockbuster era ends — and the blockbuster era, by every measure that matters, has already ended.
What happens next is whether Hollywood admits it or keeps pretending the tentpole model still works. The producers at Filmart have already moved on. The question is whether the studios will follow, or whether they'll keep writing nine-figure checks for franchises nobody asked for until the money runs out.
