The Distribution of Contemporary Italian Cinema in the United States: The Films of Luca Guadagnino and Paolo Sorrentino

This essay will address the dissemination of contemporary Italian cinema in North-American theatres. In the first part, it provides an overview of theatrical circulation strategies over the past few decades, offering a historical perspective on the economic and cultural distribution processes of Italian cinema in the United States. In the second, the article focuses on quantitative data in order to examine how many and what kinds of Italian films were distributed in American theatres over the past ten years, as well as their admissions and box office takings. Specifically, this contribution focuses on the two Italian auteurs who obtained the most visibility in the US thanks to the distribution of 4 of their films between 2008 and 2017: Paolo Sorrentino and Luca Guadagnino. In order to define two different distribution models, we will identify the promotion strategies of the most widely circulated films directed by these auteurs: La grande bellezza/The Great Beauty (2013) and Youth (2015) by Sorrentino, and Io sono l’amore/I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash by Guadagnino. In the final section, we relate these cases to the historical circulation patterns of Italian cinema.