As Hollywood's shift from Gunga Din to Dracula 2000 indicates, the US film industry's early experiments with Victorian narratives had proven effective to such an extent that, by the end of the century, even an adaptation of a novel as important to British colonial discourse as Stoker's text appeared seamlessly American despite being largely shot in Canada. Such an overwhelming influence has severe implications for English-language postcolonial national cinemas that, in contrast to industries like Bollywood and Nollywood, invite direct comparison to Hollywood's output.

For Tom O'Regan, ‘Producing in the English language also encourages a sense amongst audiences, distributors and exhibitors that the local cinema is interchangeable with US and to a lesser extent British films.’ Such is especially true in settler nations such as Australia in which only 5–7% of annual box-office revenue comes from locally made films, which are trying to compete with Hollywood's latest releases. In addition, this problem of interchangeability is compounded in Australia because of its popularity as a location for Hollywood productions such as the Wachowski's The Matrix (1999) and George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels. In addition, Australian filmmakers who left the Australian film industry for successful Hollywood careers, such as Peter Weir, George Miller, Gillian Armstrong, Baz Luhrmann and P. J. Hogan, often bring their studio projects back home – much more prodigal sons and daughters than directors of the ‘runaway productions’ that transformed the Canadian film industry. This trend also holds true for the host of Hollywood acting talent hailing from or with ties to Australia, beginning with ‘golden age’ swashbuckler Errol Flynn and including Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Mel Gibson, Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Naomi Watts, Margot Robbie, Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne and Chris and Liam Hemsworth among others.

Resulting from its dynamic and internationally recognised film culture as well as its often-tendentious ties to both Britain and the US, Australia serves as an integral nation to defining the postcolonial elements of settler cinemas. While Australia has the distinction of producing the first feature in film history with Charles Tait's largely lost The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, its cinema has largely worked within many of the same genres as Hollywood, though accented with localised concerns: the western, the road movie, and the ‘Ocker’ film – a hybrid of the rural fish-out-of-water trope and sex comedy typified by Peter Faiman's international blockbuster Crocodile Dundee (1986).