Writing After Hollywood didn't turn out exactly how I expected. When I pitched the column two years ago, I assumed what happened in the late 90s and noughties would continue: the prolific flow of mainstream hits from beyond Hollywood's borders, from Ringu to Slumdog Millionaire, that seemed to be making the cinema world more multilateral. That shift was what I wanted to explore week by week, flitting between countries, as well as examine the effects on Hollywood itself. How it responded to popular film-makers working in their own languages, foreign CGI houses that could match it for quality but beat it on price, audiences that wouldn't swallow the same US-centric stories; the whole new globalised rubric.

That idea hit the bin. I now believe Slumdog, hailed as cracking open the Oscars for foreign-language pictures when it bagged best picture in 2009, can actually be seen as the end of an era; a little one at least. What's become clear is that the foreign breakthroughs have slowed to a trickle since, especially compared with the upswell of noughties new waves – J-horror, Mexican, South Korean, Romanian – that hit cinemas in the west. Part of the reason surely was the constricted financial climate that followed the credit crunch, which affected cinema at all levels. It's definitely noticeable in the UK, for instance, that foreign film distribution, since the heady days of Tartan, has thinned (though VOD has possibly played a part, too). When Third Window, our premier Asian-film outlet, announced last year it was giving up on theatrical, it seemed a sign of the times.

But if there was less to see, I still had the sense the ground was moving beneath our feet in cinema. Quiet jolts had been registered since the early 1990s, but the media seriously cottoned on to Hollywood's seismic priority-shift from US domestic to overseas box office in 2012. The daddy of these emerging markets was, of course, China, which became the second-largest film territory that same year – another zinger of a headline making it into news sections. So while After Hollywood managed to zero in on the occasional sleeper hit, I found myself drawn back repeatedly to these more macro stories, the players slugging it out in geological time like Pacific Rim kaiju.

JA Bayona's The Orphanage (2007), one of the biggest non-English-language crossovers of the decade. Photograph: c.PicHouse/Everett / Rex Feature

What is clear is the Usain Bolt-like gap Hollywood still maintains over the rest worldwide – which is weird considering the panic attacks it's been prone to over the last few years. At the same time as Ron Meyer, president of Universal, voiced what everybody had been thinking about making "really shitty movies", said excremental blockbusters were the ones securing global control for Hollywood, applying the big demographic rolling pin to flatten out the world. So is it the best of times; is it the worst? The strangest, no doubt. The US industry, as we saw last week, is also making successful inroads into foreign-language film-making (resurrecting a strategy first used in the late 1920s). Could this be, with studio policy aiming at recouping profit inside the country of origin, why foreign breakout films were becoming scarce?

One recurring comment from readers was that the column had an anti-American bias. I suppose the clue was in the name, but I hoped After Hollywood could be read both ways, and also as a tribute to the lynchpin influence of the US industry. It was a rare article that didn't mention the H-word at some point. But the underlying hope, I confess, was that a real challenger to the Entertainment Hub That Shall Not Be Named, with a different take on "mainstream", might be in the offing. The evidence on the ground was frustrating, from the Gulf countries' unrealistic expectations, to Bollywood's international marketing aversion, to Japan's near disappearance at global level, to Nollywood's struggle to reach the next level.

"Global breakout hits need to be in English" was another suggestion I heard more than once, from several insiders. I'm not so sure: the noughties provided numerous counter-examples; nor does it appear to be the rule in TV, supposedly the new old cutting-edge medium. That mantra had the air of a piece of received wisdom propping up the status quo.

Stealing Hollywood's tricks, and its actors ... Christian Bale in The Flowers of War. Photograph: Revolver

It's a proposition that could be tested to destruction once the Chinese industry finds its feet, and starts to assert itself as a cinematic powerhouse. It's certainly got enough of a home foundation. Its domestic market, if current growth rates are sustained, will outstrip the US by 2017; it has a massive global diaspora (twice the size of the Indian one), as well as the potential to culturally dominate Pacific cinema; the Chinese government, despite Hollywood's efforts to penetrate the market, seems likely to retain local control. It doesn't mean their films will be any better: there's still little sign of a Chinese commercial cinema with a distinct, dynamic identity of its own. With so much money on the table, the temptation is to play safe, and just steal Hollywood's tricks.

Maybe, if Chinawood (sorry!) and Bollywood truly want to compete, it's time for their visionaries, megalomaniacs, mavericks and crazies, their DeMilles and DW Griffiths, to come out. The global landscape has turned out to be much more bleak and intimidating than I thought when I start writing After Hollywood – all billion-dollar grosses and multi-part franchises stampeding over the egalitarian global village fete I had in mind. I'm taking a break, but I hope to cover the same beat for the Guardian in future; less frequently, more in sync with global cinema's largissimo sweeps. And maybe better placed to pick out the odd intriguing bright glint, too.

More on the state of the global box office

• The complete After Hollywood archive

• Read more about the state of the US box office