Why is Pedro Almodovar not more successful worldwide?

If you study the history of foreign films, i.e., non-U.S. films (Hollywood having dominated world cinema at least during the sound era and most definitely after World War II), you will find that the greatest directors either maintain their integrity and continue in their "little pond", or go the other route, joining the Hollywood industry. Even remaining in their own countries, some make Hollywood style films -usually denoted by shooting English language rather than there native tongue. This doesn't mean their films have to be bad or inferior: Antonioni, Visconti, Leone and Bertolucci are outstanding examples of Italian directors making English-track films and succeeding. Werner Herzog failed in this attempt -his English versions of Aguirre, Nosferatu and others did not breakthrough, and even these films are generally shown in German version w/English subtitles (though I have seen them both ways). The brilliant French director Rene Clement (many classics like Battle of the Rails, Walls of Malapaga, Forbidden Games, Gervaise) made all of his later films in English including the fabulous hit Rider on the Rain, but lost his critical following by doing so. Many other examples show directors going international, but Fassbinder's case is instructive: his great films, which have an enduring following 30 years later, are the small German language films he made, 4 or more per year, in the 1970s, not his big, international English-track flops Querelle and Lili Marleen. His fellow German Wolfgang Petersen made several wonderful German films, notably The Consequence and Das Boot (best film of its genre, bar none), but backed by huge German budgets and later Hollywood financing his works of the past 25 years are without personality -he might as well be a Hollywood hack like Michael Bay or McG. So I am arguing that Almodovar, by sticking to his guns (it's hard to imagine him selling out; like Jim Jarmusch why would he sacrifice his artistic independence just for bigger budgets -no way!) and filming Spanish-language cinema, sometimes of hermetic themes, he makes it impossible to break out into the mainstream. The mainstream is coarse and unsubtle so what is he missing? Like Woody Allen in America, whose successful hits gross $25,000,000 as a ceiling (a pittance for mainstream directors), he will command a loyal following. I was fortunate to meet both Fassbinder and Almodovar on separate occasions at the NY Film Festival, and I remember well that Almodovar stated he was following carefully in Fassbinder's original tradition, making films "brick by brick" and not compromising. Of course, Almodovar is not a workaholic like RWF, but his films are well-crafted and I for one hope he is not tempted by some fast talking producer (let me name drop Jeremy Thomas in the Bertolucci case) into making some vast epic about the French Revolution or Spanish Civil War on a $100,000,000 budget, shot in English. The process I'm describing is most obvious along the English/non-English divide, but the same reasoning applies to the history of British and Australian (don't get me started on New Zealand: Peter Jackson) directors who smoothly leave their promising youthful but parochial work behind and soon join the international money club, a la Canadian James Cameron, whereby Big Bucks & being King of the World takes precedence to any artistry.

I would think the answer is rather simple... I guess it would be because his stories include a little of ourselves. Even a little deail in the main characters touches a bit of ourselves (it does not matter if the character is wether a woman and you are a male viewer and viceversa... and of course it would not matter if the character is a transvestite and the viewer is not)

Now... if you are asking the technical aspects, I would think is the photography and the way he makes us feel inside the movie and the times

I hope I explained myself and if it is helpful to you, you can put it in much better words

Thanks

Actually, in Israel his films play the multiplexes, and they unusually start before their US screenings.

"Let there be songs, to fill the air" ("Ripple")

His films are good because he is bold in his writing without abandoning his audience and sense of goodwill. His films are not blockbusters because they're not in English. It's really that simple. He's definitely in good company among excellent foreign filmmakers, though.

Maybe that's not entirely fair, though. He did gain a good deal of notoriety in the US from Volver, which is an immensely likable film, and stars Penelope Cruz, who American audiences knew by that point. To call it a blockbuster may be an exaggeration (I don't know its numbers offhand), but it probably did about as well as any non-English film has done, with a couple exceptions (Amelie comes to mind).

Even the great auteurs never did that well in the states, though; Bergman, Lang, and Kurosawa are still pretty unknown here. What they, like Almodovar, do well is to make films for their audience, which are the cinephiles that don't mind watching a subtitled film. In playing to that audience, these directors take on more audacious material than the average romcom. Yes, it would be nice if there were more cinephiles, and they didn't have a reputation of being "film snobs", but those are projects for the industry, like the perpetual redemption of Hollywood.

So why is Almodovar not more popular? Again, to be blunt, it's really because they're in Spanish. This dissuades American audiences, which dissuades American distributors, which dissuades international distributors. Still, he's got his fans among cinephiles, Spaniards, and Latin Americans, I expect; it's hard to say he's not successful when he's one of the top directors in international cinema today. His people know him.

Something interesting about this is actually that Almodovar is much more popular outside of Spain than he is domestically. Most Spanish critics write pretty unfavorable reviews about his films, the newer ones especially.

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I think you mean North America, because pretty much everywhere else his films ARE shown in multiplexes alongside the american blockbusters, he's been commercially successful for a long, long time now, just not in United States, of course his movies will never make as much money as Transformers or the like, but for independent, spanish speaking cinema, Almodovar is as big as it gets, commercially.

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