From Christina Klein writing for YaleGlobal, republished in the International Herald Tribune: How Hollywood helps keep out foreign films (http://iht.com/articles/535872.html)

"Few foreign films make it onto American screens: In 2001, imports represented less than 1 percent of all films shown in the United States. Free traders would argue that Americans simply prefer Hollywood movies, but the real reasons for this imbalance are more structural than cultural.

"The market for foreign films has shrunk in the United States over the past 30 years with the rise of American independent film, the decline in independent theaters and the vertical integration of the U.S. film industry. In such an environment, the gatekeeping role played by U.S. distributors of foreign films becomes ever more crucial. 'Hero' is a case in point.
. . .
"Even with demonstrated global appeal, however, 'Hero,' released in China in 2002, has been withheld from American viewers for nearly two years, despite garnering an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film and rave reviews by American critics who have seen it at film festivals. And it isn't clear whether 'Hero' will reach multiplexes across the United States, like a mainstream commercial film, or only a few cities, like an art film.

"The movie's American fate rests largely in the hands of Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films, which owns the North American rights to 'Hero.' Miramax deserves credit for helping to introduce Americans to East Asian art cinema and for popularizing Hong Kong action film in the 1990s, but in recent years has come to be seen as an obstacle to the circulation of Asian films in the United States.

"The company has paid top prices for desirable foreign films, thereby keeping them out of the hands of competitors. Instead of releasing all the films it buys, however, Miramax has shelved quite a few of them, keeping them off the market for years or giving them such a limited release that few Americans have a chance to see them. Although it paid $20 million for the rights to 'Hero,' Miramax sat on the film for almost two years. According to The New York Times, it only agreed to release it after being pressured by Beijing and receiving extra marketing funds from Disney, its parent company, which has close business ties to China."

Hollywood remembers the Fifities, that's why.

From 1958 or so on, Italy was flooding the American market with movies. Good ones. This is when Federico Fellini was making his best stuff. It goes without saying others took advantage of the situation also, it was around this time Ingmar Bergman was packing theatres in the states too.

Hollywood managed to stop all that dead in less than a decade.

In this regard Hollywood is exactly like the rest of the US: They talk up "Free Market" and do the opposite. They have always hated competition whether from other studios abroad or even Americans they don't like, which means most of us.

By the mid-60s Italian studios were making Clint Eastwood's spagetti westerns and the game was up. Hollywood just bought them off and started making pictures like it domestically. Hollywood never competed. If they had tried they would have gotten killed. But where American industry is concerned that's the rule, not the exception.

They also do another nifty trick by re-making a foreign film, instead of releasing it in the states. The remake of "The Ring" comes to mind.

Hollywood cornering the market? Hollywood doing without the competition? Hollywood controlling whatever comes out of it's intellectual property known as the movie industry?

No one group could be behind such activities. It's just nature running her course, where the parasite has gone crazy.

Exactly. What would be the good of buying movies just to suppress them?

It's all capitalism, free trade.

Nothing to do with censorship or secret rule by the jews, move along, nothing to see here.