Perspective: Movie studios are abandoning Russia, a far cry from how they handled Nazi Germany
Russia is a major market for American films, so such actions will hurt Hollywood’s bottom line. The first “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie earned almost $11 million in Russia. The recent Sony blockbuster “Spider-Man: No Way Home” raked in a staggering $45 million.Making these moves even more remarkable, the American movie industry has a long history of trying not to anger foreign business partners. Taking sides, therefore, is very much out of step with Hollywood’s history.
Casual film fans, perhaps recalling Charlie Chaplin’s classic 1940 sendup of Hitler, “The Great Dictator,” might believe that Hollywood led the charge in denouncing Nazi militarism. It did not. Before the U.S. entrance into the war in 1941, the big studios made only a few anti-Nazi pictures, including the largely forgotten “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” and “The Mortal Storm” . Even those films pulled their punches by minimizing critical elements of Nazi ideology such as antisemitism.
In summer 1939 — months after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia — MGM invited Nazi film editors to tour the studio. Meanwhile, an ever-dwindling number of American-made features screened in Germany. The Americans still wanted in; it was the Nazis who tightened the screws. The last Hollywood studios still active in Germany finally closed their Berlin offices in 1940 after concluding that censorship and currency restrictions made it impossible for them to turn a profit.
Other realities also played a role. The movie moguls, most of whom were Jewish, feared that making anti-Nazi films or exiting Germany might arouse domestic antisemitism — something they had long faced from a public that loved their films but questioned their Americanism. Finally, Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s operated under a self-imposed but rigorously enforced