Hollywood portrayal of modern international terrorism in blockbuster action-adventure films: From the Iran hostage crisis to September 11, 2001

The American commercial film industry, Hollywood, has often borrowed its story ideas from the U.S. foreign policy agenda, at times reinforcing U.S. policies while at times undermining them and offering alternative interpretations to them and to news media portrayals. One of the film industry's blockbuster film loans in the last two decades has been modern international terrorism. Research on Hollywood portrayals of international terrorism has been almost non-existent although the movie industry has produced well over one hundred films on modern terrorism since the emergence of the phenomenon in international relations in 1968. Hollywood rarely touched the topic of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s when the phenomenon was not high on the U.S. foreign policy agenda, in news headlines nor in the American public consciousness. In the 1980s, in the footsteps of the Reagan administration, the commercial film industry found international terrorism a threat to the U.S. and brought terrorist villains to the big screen, making terrorism a blockbuster film product in the 1990s.; Hollywood films disproportionately focus on conflict, which follows the classical Hollywood cinema screenwriting structure but not necessarily the events of international relations. This study examines how the Hollywood action-adventure film genre has portrayed international terrorism in the most commercially successful films, i.e., in the annual top fifty films of the domestic box-office, and how that portrayal compares to the U.S. policies on international terrorism. The study covers the time period from 1980 to September 11, 2001, i.e., from the Iran hostage crisis, which brought international terrorism into the American public consciousness, until the day of the biggest terrorist attack ever against the United States. The film portrayals of international terrorism are compared to the definitions and data of the State Department's annual publications on international terrorism, which offer an official U.S. understanding of international terrorism. The study has an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from the fields of journalism, communication, film studies, and international relations. The work relies on cultural studies and critical political economy as its main theoretical and methodological approaches.