New screenwriters are usually taught to write what they know, and to picture an American audience when they think about who's watching. That instinct made sense for decades, but the streaming era has quietly rewired who's actually deciding what gets made, and it's worth understanding before you settle on your next project.
The shift is clear in the data. In a recent quarter, U.S. viewers spent only 62% of their time on Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video watching domestically produced content, with a quarter of their viewing time going to non-U.S. programming and the rest split between international co-productions. That's a meaningful change from a decade ago, when American content dominated these platforms almost entirely, even for American viewers. Audiences have developed a real appetite for stories from outside the U.S., and streamers have responded accordingly.
The production side backs this up even more directly. Netflix and Amazon now produce over half of their content internationally, and global investment in non-U.S. production is forecast to grow by roughly 30% over the next several years, with notable increases in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa region. These aren't token investments; they represent a structural shift in where studios believe the next hit can come from, and who they're willing to greenlight to write it.
For a new writer, this creates both an opportunity and a caution. The opportunity is that a story rooted in a specific culture, setting, or perspective outside the traditional Hollywood mold is no longer automatically a harder sell; it may actually be exactly what a streamer's international content strategy is looking for. If you have a genuine connection to a place, community, or story that isn't the default American setting, that specificity can be a real asset rather than something to sand down to seem more mainstream.
The caution is that writing "for a global audience" doesn't mean writing something vague enough to appeal to everyone. The stories succeeding internationally tend to be sharply specific rather than deliberately generic, because specificity is usually what makes a story feel authentic rather than exported. If you're considering a story set outside your own direct experience, invest in real research or collaboration rather than assumption, since streamers and audiences alike have gotten better at spotting stories that feel written from the outside looking in. The takeaway for someone building a portfolio right now is simple: don't assume a culturally specific idea needs to be "Americanized" before anyone will consider it. Increasingly, the opposite is true.
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