The most important New Zealand movie of 2003, Niki Caro's Whale Rider, first shown at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2002, where it was voted People's Choice, and released elsewhere the following year, was one of the most successful fiction films made in this country, winning twenty-nine international awards. Apart from being highly successful in New Zealand, with ticket sales of 752,941, making it the fourth most popular locally made movie to date, even more significantly, it was a huge hit internationally, with foreign box office earnings of $20,662,227. In addition, it was the first feature- length film to be adapted from a novel by Witi Ihimaera, the most prominent Māori writer of fiction, inaugurating several other adaptations based on his works, including Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Katie Wolfe, 2010), a coming-out drama, and Mahana (Lee Tamahori, 2016), based on the novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, with further plans under way to film his major novel The Matriarch.

Despite Whale Rider's popularity with audiences, however, within New Zealand its reception was mixed. In particular, some Māori found the film culturally offensive, and objected to the fact that a Pākehā director had presumed to make it. The scholar Brendan Hokowhitu, for example, saw Whale Rider as ‘a problematic and even dangerous film for the project of Māori decolonization,’ on the grounds that ‘Pākehā have embraced this movie because it promotes a conscious paternalistic narrative of nurturing a savage culture while repressing the role of Pākehā in the oppression of Māori.’ In similar vein, Tania Ka'ai denounced the film as misrepresenting various tribal traditions, arguing that ‘the patriarchy/feminism division operates very differently in the Ngāti Porou tribe, where Whale Rider is based, than it does either in the film or in Eurocentric feminisms.’

What such criticisms point towards is the fact that Caro and her producer, John Barnett of South Pacific Pictures, deliberately reworked the source story of Whale Rider for the sake of making the film appeal to an international audience.