For decades, “the movies” meant one place. Soundstages in Burbank, premieres on Sunset Boulevard, a release calendar built around summer blockbusters and awards-season dramas timed for December. That picture has been cracking apart for a while now, and by 2026 it’s basically unrecognizable. Streaming platforms erased distance almost overnight, letting a thriller shot in Seoul or a family drama filmed in Lagos land in living rooms from Toronto to Tokyo within days of release. Box office records are falling in places that rarely made international headlines a decade ago. Here’s a look at eight countries where the most interesting filmmaking is happening right now, and why each one deserves attention.
South Korea
South Korea’s entertainment industry has moved past being a regional curiosity and become one of the defining cultural exports of the decade. South Korea’s influence internationally continues to boom, as K-pop drives youth music tastes and shows such as Squid Game deliver outsized results for the likes of Netflix. The country’s screen sector generated an enormous amount of value in 2025, with a major industry report putting the figure at over 17 billion dollars.
What makes Korean cinema and television genuinely exciting is the refusal to dilute local storytelling for global taste. Netflix Korea content chief Don Kang has said they never expected Squid Game to become Netflix’s number one show globally, adding that it happened by focusing on local teams working on local stories for local audiences. That approach paid off spectacularly, since the Korean survival drama’s latest season shattered Netflix records with over 60 million views in three days and became the first show to rank No. 1 in all 93 countries where Netflix maintains Top 10 lists during its debut week. Filmmakers like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook set the template years ago, and a new generation is building on it with thrillers, historical dramas, and horror that rarely feel formulaic.
Japan
Japan just had, by any measure, its biggest year at the movies. “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle – Part 1” anchored a banner year for Japan’s theatrical market in 2025, helping push total box office receipts to a record 274.45 billion yen, roughly 1.79 billion dollars, up 32% from 2024. That single film became a genuine global phenomenon rather than a niche anime hit confined to fan communities.
The scale of that success is worth sitting with for a moment. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle achieved remarkable global success, becoming one of the highest-grossing Japanese films and the highest-grossing anime film worldwide, with an estimated 728.2 million dollars earning globally. Local live-action cinema is thriving too, since the year’s second-largest title was “Kokuho,” which earned 127 million dollars, making it the all-time highest-grossing live-action Japanese film locally. Japan isn’t just exporting content anymore, it’s setting box office benchmarks that outperform most Hollywood releases in their home market.
Nigeria
Nollywood’s growth story has quietly become one of the more remarkable shifts in global cinema. For the first time in the region’s recorded history, Nollywood captured the largest market share, securing 49.4% of the total gross compared to Hollywood’s 48.8%, up from Hollywood’s 52% share in 2024 against Nollywood’s 46%. Nigeria produces an astonishing volume of films, and the industry has gone from informal, direct-to-video roots to something far more polished.
The numbers behind this shift are striking on their own. Nigeria’s cinema industry recorded its strongest performance ever in 2025, with a total box office gross of 15.6 billion naira, approximately 10.4 million dollars, a 34.72% increase from the previous year. A single title, Behind the Scenes, led as the highest-grossing local title with 1.32 billion naira. Streaming deals with international platforms have widened the audience further, giving Nigerian filmmakers a reach that would have seemed unimaginable fifteen years ago.
Brazil
Brazilian cinema had a landmark moment in 2025 that changed how the country’s film industry is viewed abroad. Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” scooped the Best International Feature Film Oscar, marking the first time that an entry from Brazil has won in the category. That win came after several near misses, since the director had been nominated before without taking home the prize.
The film’s subject matter gave it weight beyond typical awards-season buzz. Directed by Walter Salles, the film stars Fernanda Torres as a mother forced to reinvent herself when her family’s life is shattered by an act of arbitrary violence during the tightening grip of a military dictatorship in Brazil, 1971. The response at home was enormous, with wild celebrations on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, where Torres, already something of a national hero, had been named an unlikely muse of that year’s carnival. Brazil’s film industry has produced acclaimed work for decades, but this was the first time the Academy formally recognized it at the top of the international category.
India
India’s film landscape in 2025 told a story that went beyond the usual Bollywood headlines. In October 2025, Kantara: A Legend Chapter 1 emerged as India’s highest-grossing film of the year with 735 crore rupees, roughly 83.05 million dollars. That film came out of the Kannada-language industry, not Hindi cinema, underscoring a broader shift happening across the country.
Regional cinema has genuinely taken over the conversation. Industry figures noted that 2025 marked a landmark year for regional films, with Marathi, Gujarati, and Malayalam titles showing sustained traction, and Gujarati cinema drawing high repeat audiences and crossing 10 million footfalls by early October 2025. Malayalam cinema in particular had a strong run, since films including Lokah Chapter 1 Chandra, L2 Empuraan, and Thudarum together surpassed 700 crore rupees, about 79.1 million dollars, in global revenue. The takeaway is simple: India’s most exciting filmmaking right now isn’t concentrated in one hub, it’s spread across several regional industries competing on quality rather than star power alone.
France
France remains the country most associated with cinema as an art form, and its industry still carries real commercial weight internationally. The international box office for French productions rose 6% in 2025, generating 317 million dollars in box office receipts worldwide. That growth came even as domestic attendance for French-language films softened somewhat over the same period.
France’s reach has also shifted geographically in an interesting way. Unifrance noted that Latin America had become French cinema’s second biggest regional market after Western Europe, with Mexico topping the territory chart, delivering 4.2 million admissions. Meanwhile, France ranked sixth in terms of the number of films and series released on international SVOD platforms, behind the United States, China, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Cannes remains the industry’s most closely watched annual event, and French distributors continue to push animation and co-productions as a growth lever even when live-action struggles at home.
United Kingdom
The UK occupies an unusual position, since it functions both as a major production hub for American studios and as a source of distinctly British storytelling that travels well on its own. On Netflix specifically, Korean content consistently represents 8% to 9% of viewing hours, ahead of U.K. content at 7% to 8%, and Japanese content at 4% to 5% of viewing time. That ranking might sound modest, but it places British programming ahead of Japan in raw streaming hours, which is no small thing given the scale of anime’s global following.
British productions have also delivered specific breakout hits recently, since shows like “Black Doves” Season 1 and “The Gentlemen” Season 1 performed strongly despite the growing competition from Korean and Japanese content. Britain’s advantage is infrastructure. Its studios, crews, and post-production houses are deeply integrated into global filmmaking, which means UK-made films and series often reach audiences through channels that smaller national industries can’t easily access.
Spain
Spanish-language cinema has built a loyal international following, particularly through streaming, even if it doesn’t generate headlines at the same volume as Korea or Japan. South Korean content outpaces content from other major Netflix markets, including the UK, Japan, and Spain, with Spanish content still trailing in total viewing hours. Still, Spain punches well above its size in terms of critical recognition, with directors like Pedro Almodóvar and J.A. Bayona maintaining strong international profiles.
Spain’s film industry benefits from close cultural and linguistic ties to Latin America, which gives its productions a natural audience far beyond Europe. Co-productions between Spain and countries like Mexico and Argentina have become increasingly common, blending resources and storytelling traditions in ways that produce distinctive work. While Spain hasn’t had a single 2025 or 2026 breakout on the scale of Brazil’s Oscar win or Japan’s anime records, its steady output of acclaimed dramas and thrillers keeps it firmly in the conversation about where interesting cinema is being made outside the American studio system.
