It is probably premature to concur with Andreas Busche's notion of a “third wave” of German filmmaking, that is, a moment to rival the creativity of the Weimar period on the one hand, or the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s on the other. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that German cinema is closer now to emulating the success of these earlier times than it has been for years, measurable most obviously in the level of international success contemporary German filmmakers presently enjoy. Of course, it remains the case that the nearest the vast majority of the cinema-going public come to a “German” film, both at home and abroad, are Hollywood blockbusters such as The Day after Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004) or Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), that happen to have German directors, or one of the other numerous Hollywood films to have benefited from German funding such as John Woo's Mission: Impossible II (2000) or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Nonetheless, in recent years a more identifiably German national cinema has without doubt had a good degree of international impact.

This renaissance of international interest in German film began in 1998 with Tom Tykwer's hit film Lola rennt, which won the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Festival in the United States and subsequently broke into the top twenty of the U.S. box-office, something not achieved by a German film since the early 1980s.