In response to the growing importance of the global cinema marketplace, The Hollywood Reporter is, well, reporting that Sony Pictures Entertainment has created an international motion picture
production department, which will be led by Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, and Deborah
Schindler, the former head of Red Om Films who has run the East Coast motion picture production and development operation for Columbia Pictures since 2005.

With the way the film business is expanding these days, I’m frankly a bit shocked to learn that Sony is the only Hollywood studio to maintain stand-alone, local-language production units throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. International theatrical receipts are of course a bigger and bigger slice of the pie these days (see Night at the Museum, if you doubt). They can make a bonafide hit out of relative under-performers like Troy or Kingdom of Heaven, and help birth sequels for so-so successes like Underworld and Resident Evil. But the under-discussed subtext of that lesson is that there is such a thing as separate foreign tastes (duh), and those distinctions are bubbling to the surface more and more. Why more Hollywood studios don’t try to explicitly cater to those rabid, burgeoning bases, I’m not sure.