ABSTRACT This essay develops an investigation inside political economy of culture field aiming to problematize and unveil ways to understand the Hollywood cinema hegemony in Brazil, focusing on distribution in movie theaters. We hypothesize that the Brazilian cinema economic underdevelopment has its origin in macroeconomic issues, namely, in the film industry oligopolistic structure on a world scale that has achieved market domination, especially in the sphere of distribution, by the majors. Observing what Ellen Wood writes about contemporary imperialism, we operate with the ideas of the competitive triad of Alfred Chandler, centralization of the capital of Harry Braverman and globalization of the capital of François Chesnais, to understand the structure and contemporary organization of the great media corporations. Based on data published by the Brazilian Cinema and Audiovisual Observatory (OCA-ANCINE), we analyzed the performance of foreign distributors in Brazil, as well as two contemporary movements that reconfigure the market: the digitalization of theaters and the emergence of streaming.

Kewords: Cinema Political Economy; Cinematographic Distribution; Culture and Imperialism; Brazilian Cinema.