The international market has definitely became an even bigger factor than it was in the last few years. And not just on the films you might expect. Look how huge Mamma Mia was overseas. Foreign grosses used to be expected to about match domestic grosses on a Hollywood blockbuster. Now I would say they inching closer to averaging 50% more than domestic.
U.S. ticket sales seem to be declining, no doubt because of the huge price increases in the last year or two which came at the worst possible time, when our economy is cratering.
There also seems to be a little boredom setting in for superhero movies and CGI cartoons, which used to be reliably massive grossers here but have been declining. But foreigners are still eating up those types of films and seem to be much less picky about quality. Spider-Man 3 was panned here and grossed much more poorly than the other two, but it was the most popular of the series overseas.
Unfortunately if you look around at other markets, EVERYTHING’S doing better overseas. The U.S. economy SUCKS right now. That cannot be understated. There is NO growth potential here in just about any market, but lots of it overseas.
A lot of why things do better overseas is scale not economy. There’s 311 million people in America, 6.5 BILLION in the not-America part of the world, that’s a lot more people to sell to. Even if you only get half the penetration you’re still talking 5 times the sales.