Alejandro González Iñárritu's role as a marketing executive in the 1990s, running his own advertising agency and making adverts for a number of clients including Mexican television company Televisa, has been cited as key to his ultimate success as a filmmaker and his ability to connect with Mexico's new middle class cinema audience (Sanchez Prado 2014: 70). The 1990s neoliberal changes to the film industry, the consequent shift away from an art cinemadominated model of state patronised national cinema, and the emergence of new production companies and private funding, are also cited as significant factors in the advent of independent films that follow commercial formats and, like Iñárritu's debut feature Amores perros, consequently achieve a high level of box office success (de la Mora, 2003: 14). After Amores perros (2000), Iñárritu was courted by the US industry and has gone on to make his subsequent five features, 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010), Birdman (2013) and most recently The Revenant (2015) within its expanding parameters: firstly, with the US independent speciality divisions and most recently with a major studio (Twentieth Century Fox).

Although insistently still called a ‘Mexican’ filmmaker in the press, – indeed, in the run up to the 88th Academy Awards he was held up as the only person of colour to be nominated for a major award behind or in front of the camera (Binelli 2016) – Iñárritu's films have been increasingly written about in English language criticism in ways that emphasise; their US pedigree (McGowan 2008: 405), their ‘globalised art cinema’ credentials (Kerr 2010), their ‘global Hollywood gaze’ (Shaw 2011) or their ‘global cinema lens’ (Begin 2015: 1) and de-emphasise their Mexican/Latin American features and stylistics. Most recently, The Revenant has been perceived as a straightforward ‘white settler narrative’ supporting and privileging the abilities of one white man to survive the harsh winter and a near death experience (Quayson, 2016).