Americans Hate Tingle / Live-Action Films

Live-action films that are examples of Americans Hate Tingle by being much less popular in a certain country.

Countries in general

• Indians, by default, generally loathe any portrayal of them or their country that is even in the least bit negative. Part of this is N-Word Privileges (they can criticize their own country as much as they like - foreigners can just shut up), but there is also the fact that many of these portrayals come from the Anglosphere, which as far as many in India are concerned, is directly responsible for most of the things the criticisms are about (especially Britain and its colonial exploitation in The Raj). There are also elements of Misplaced Nationalism / Patriotic Fervor.
  • It is still very much an unwritten rule in India that going after public figures, history or social issues on any tack except the official position is going to be a big Berserk Button. Putting people, ideals, and traditions on pedestals is Serious Business in India.
  • Indians seem to feel this way about any humorous depiction of Mahatma Gandhi, for very obvious reasons. There was a major backlash on YouTube over the "Gandhi II" clip from the movie UHF, a fake movie trailer that re-imagines Gandhi as a 1970s blaxploitation-like vigilante. The joke is simply a parody of actionized sequels taken to such an extreme that even Gandhi gets the treatment.
  • Slumdog Millionaire was widely despised by many in India, due to its obliviousness to the Bollywood cliches that were in it and the stereotypical portrayal of India as a poverty-ridden hellhole. Elsewhere, the reception was almost overwhelmingly positive, where it won 8 Academy Awards (including "Best Picture"), and the film currently has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
  • There's also a great amount of bitterness among Indians regarding films set around Britain during World War II. Nearly all such films tend to omit that India was under British rule or even that 2.5 million Indian soldiers fought in the war at all. It makes for more simplistic & exciting storytelling to portray the British as a sole island standing back against the fascistic invading empire, but doing so omits that the UK had an empire of its own that bled in the battles.
  • While critical reception for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom warmed up from mixed reactions to more favorable, this was not the case in India, where government censors temporarily banned it due to its negative portrayals of Hinduism such as Hindus eating baby snakes, eyeball soup, beetles, and chilled monkey brains (although, in-story, the characters doing this are not Hindu but rather heavily-fictionalized Thuggee), and depicting the goddess Kali as evil when she is actually a goddess of change and empowerment. When the government denied the filmmakers permission to film in India, they used Sri Lanka to shoot the scenes set in India.
  • Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's film Water (set in 1940s India and deeply critical of many Indian traditions) was so controversial in that country that riots broke out and sets were destroyed; Mehta was eventually forced to shoot the film in Sri Lanka. The film was selected as Canada's entry for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005.
  • Several films depicting India's role in the Sri Lankan Civil War were banned out of fear it would jeopardize Indo-Sri Lankan relations and India's involvement during the early years of the war.
• Superhero movies altogether have a relative niche appeal in Japan. Avengers: Endgame is the highest grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe movie in that country, and that movie didn't gross more than $52 million. Some journalists suggest that American superhero movies star middle-aged adults who don't fit the mold of the teenage and young adult heroes so prevalent in Japanese media. Spider-Man movies are the rare exception largely because of how Peter Parker is the younger everyman who resonates more with Japanese audiences. Most notably, Spider-Man: Far From Home is the highest grossing solo MCU movie in Japan and the Spider-Man Trilogy, which pulled particularly above-average numbers in Japan even without adjusting for inflation.
• The topic of the West's reaction to Japanese films was discussed in the 1950s by Czech film historian Drahomíra Novotná, who had grouped Japanese cinema into multiple broad categories with some heavy biases: serious, introspective films dealing with realistic social issues, which she considered to be most favored by Eastern European viewers; historical dramas and epics targeted at Western Europeans, which painted a romanticized and idealized image of Japan; and finally special effect-centric fantasy films, which she saw as the absolute worst, pandering to immature American viewers but incompatible with East European entertainment standards due to their frivolous, outlandish stories and basic characters. This of course didn't stop European countries from importing these kinds of films, but by modern times public interest in Japanese special effect movies did almost fully dry up, while in the United States the genre still lingers on as a marketable (albeit niche) cult phenomenon.
• As noted in this article in The Hollywood Reporter, Germany is a notoriously poor market for action movies. Til Schweiger, the nation's biggest movie star, is known outside Germany for films like Inglourious Basterds and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life, but audiences back home know him for romantic comedies. German action filmmakers like Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Petersen often have to leave for Hollywood to get recognition.
• You want to make a movie about the Algerian Independence War? Ok, but there would be a dilemma about it: either you make the Algerian FLN the villains and you achieve success in the French market... or given that France has colonized Algeria, you make National Liberation Front rebels the good guys instead! However by making the latter choice, don't expect said movie to be a success in France, but instead cause outrage or controversy at best, or it getting loathed at worst there instead, as the Algerian National Liberation Front itself is reviled in France for having committed terrorist attacks against French civilians (namely Pied-Noir Frenchmen and Algerian Jews) and Harki militaries, and the Algerian Independence War is a very sensitive topic there. This doesn't help that, unlike the French government, the Algerian one has never apologized nor had been condemned for committing its war crimes (hence why there's widespread anti-Algerian sentiment in France, especially among right-wing French politicians and activists, as well as descendants of Harki, Pied-Noir or Jewish people). Worse, there is even systemic anti-French propaganda there (starting with the national anthem itself), even though some parts of the Algerian population begin to question the Algerian government's narrative. This is why movies about this war, especially if they have the Algerian side as the protagonists like for Outside the Law or The Battle of Algiers, never become successful nor even gain a Cult Classic status, instead becoming controversial or are outright banned in France.
• When western movies cover the Eastern Front from World War 2, they tend to do very poorly in Russia. A big reason why is that western movies tend to play up the Evil Versus Evil aspects, which is especially offensive to Russians who still consider World War 2 to be the Great Patriotic War. Even Russians who do not idolize the Soviet Union will be quick to point out that the Eastern Front was not a fist fight between Hitler and Stalin. In addition, the Soviet Union by far sacrificed the most soldiers in bringing down Nazi Germany, an aspect that is often overshadowed when movies such as Enemy at the Gates play up the brutality of the Red Army.

Specific movies/franchises/creators #-H

• 300 was hated and condemned as "Western propaganda" in Iran due to its extremely villainous portrayal of the First Persian Empire.
• Though it was a cult hit elsewhere, A Clockwork Orange wasn't very well received in Great Britain, as many thought that the film's depictions of violence and gang rape were too extreme and blamed them for inspiring multiple copycat crimes, to the point where director Stanley Kubrick had the film removed from British distribution, with the ban lifted only after his death in 1999.
• In the US, the film adaptation of John Grisham's A Time to Kill got good reviews, was a solid box-office hit, and won an NAACP Image Award. In Europe, reviews were far more negative, with critics seeing its plot (about a white lawyer defending a black vigilante who murdered his ten-year-old daughter's white rapists) as glorifying violence and extrajudicial murder and some going so far as to call it borderline fascist. French critics in particular were downright scathing, with Didier Péron, the critic for the newspaper Libération, saying that the film "militates in favour of the black cause only to legitimize... the mentally ill gesture of the avenging father", and the French branch of Amnesty International calling the film disturbing. The French release even had a question mark added to the end of the title (Le Droit de tuer?) in order to make the film's morality seem more ambiguous. A lot of the controversy came down to Values Dissonance over the morality of the death penalty; while Americans at the time of the film's release were overwhelmingly in favor of it (support reached an all-time high at 80% in 1994, just two years before the film came out), it is banned and extremely unpopular in most of Europe, where it is seen as a violation of human rights and associated with the crimes and authoritarianism of the Nazis and the Soviets.^note As of 2023, it has been completely abolished in every European country except for Russia and Belarus, with Belarus being the only one to still actively use it.
• Argo was a major box office success in the U.S. and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but was not well-liked in Canada, Britain, or New Zealand for minimizing the work of those countries' embassies to make the Americans out to be the sole heroes of the rescue. The film even got such a poor reception at the Toronto International Film Festival that director Ben Affleck had to go back and recut some of the film (less than a month before opening) to give a fairer portrayal of the Canadians.
• Avengers: Age of Ultron caught flak in Eastern European countries for the portrayal of Sokovia. The random mishmash of shallow (exaggerated accents, tracksuits, names that varied from German to Italian to Polish to Romanian), offensive (Pietro stealing a dress to impress a girl) or misplaced (Soviet fur hats in a country modelled after the former Yugoslavia) stereotypes were seen as a Theme Park Version of Eastern Europe which could have been fixed with basic research on the filmmakers' part. Sokovia basically served as a Throwaway Country to get destroyed, and even the superheros fighting to protect it seemed somewhat disdainful ("[it's] nowhere important on the way to everywhere important"). Even its location varies within a single panning shot of a map in Captain America: Civil War, which didn't go unnoticed. It also didn't help that "important" nations such as Germany and Russia weren't replaced by fictional stand-ins in those movies.
• The makers of Braveheart were very nearly sued by the Scottish government over its depiction of national hero Robert the Bruce (even though he really did waffle back and forth on the conflict several times). The movie is generally regarded with varying degrees of embarrassment and annoyance in Scotland, as it takes one of the critical episodes in Scottish history and re-writing it from the ground up, mix-and-matching attributes from all over history and giving everyone just awful fake accents. It's even less popular in England, which isn't surprising since every named English character in the movie is evil.
• Batman movies still have problems turning in decent box office numbers in Japan, as the first Batman media brought to Japan was the old campy Adam West TV series and thus this became the Japanese mainstream's first impression of him. Later movies, like Batman (1989) and Christopher Nolan's trilogy, which depict darker, more serious stories, mostly confused Japanese audiences expecting to see colorful camp. Surprisingly however, Joker (2019), was a success in Japan, grossing over $46 million.
  • Batman (1989) was a flop in Norway despite heavy advertising. It was removed after only three weeks in theaters.
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was as divisive in China as it is in America. Not only did the movie suffer from a 77% weekend drop (compared to the 69% drop domestically) but it was also trashed by a number of bloggers and professional critics with some describing the film as "intellectually insulting" and compared it to "facial paralysis". Much of the backlash stems from the misleading marketing as audiences expected a straightforward action-packed popcorn movie only to learn that the film is overstuffed with subplots and plays out more like a political thriller. Furthermore, many of the heavy-handed Christian symbolism and references to classical humanities were lost on Chinese audiences, many of whom aren't familiar with such concepts and ideas. Zack Snyder's Justice League did a complete 180 however, cumulating millions of views on streaming platforms Migu Video, Tencent Video and BiliBili (even beating out the streaming debuts of the last two Avengers movies there) and getting rave audience scores.
• The Blue Lagoon (1949) was a commercial success worldwide but not in the United States, where Universal (then partly controlled by The Rank Organisation) mismarketed it as Le Film Artistique.
• Borat, unsurprisingly, was not at all well-received by many ethnic groups, to the point that it was banned in most Middle Eastern countries. Russia discouraged cinemas from showing it because many felt it would lead to race riots (as Russia has a Kazakh minority population). The movie wasn't shown in theatres, but it is available on DVD. Ironically, the Kazakhs loved it. Except for one of them...
• Brüno (2009), while most Germans and Austrians were fine with the Camp Gay humor and European stereotyping, they were less amused by Bruno's adoration of Hitler for obvious reasons.
• Bugsy Malone was a huge hit in the UK, but sank in the US, presumably because movie musicals were out of fashion; it also came a hair too late to capitalize on the 1930s Genre Throwback craze that peaked two years prior. It remains relatively obscure in the United States and took until 2021 to see a release on DVD and Blu-Ray there, but was available to buy digitally and had streamed free-with-ads on Pluto TV before that.
• Crazy Rich Asians, an American film with mostly Chinese and Singaporean characters, was well-received in America and Singapore but flopped in China. Various pundits attributed this to the film's theatrical release there being delayed by a few months, it focusing more on Asian-American experiences than purely Asian ones, its portrayal of Chinese culture which some saw as negative, its heavy Conspicuous Consumption leaving a bad taste since China was in economic recession at the time, or the all-Asian-American cast (which got praise for minority representation in America) not being notable in China for obvious reasons. Also, the plotline of an ordinary woman dating a rich man and being thrust into the wealthy social sphere is somewhat cliché already in Chinese media and so didn't have as much appeal.
  • The film also underperformed in Japan, which is usually pretty friendly to American movies. This was attributed to the plotline being cliché there as well, plus the cast did not have either well-known Hollywood actors or ethnically Japanese ones.
• The Day After is well-known and loved in the US (in no small part due to its role in helping end the Cold War), but when it was released theatrically in Europe it got hit with a lot of flak for supposedly downplaying the horrors of nuclear war. This is likely because Europeans didn't know that The Day After originally aired on television, meaning it had to be watered down to pass network censorship standards (a fact that's even lampshaded at the end of the film). Plus Europe had the much more realistic and horrific British Threads to compare it to, released at about the same time. The American film was considered lightweight in comparison.
• France is noticeably cold towards the DC Extended Universe, even outside the early divisive entries of Zack Snyder, which reflects in reviews and audience scores. The Dark Knight Trilogy, Marvel Cinematic Universe and The Batman have fared significantly better there. The Suicide Squad was mostly praised there, but flopped financially just like it did everywhere else.
• While already a polarizing franchise in most countries, Descendants was a complete flop in Australia. This comes from one of the central premises of families being banished to an island ghetto with no access to modern technology or decent food for committing any sort of crime, and having their children be shunned and mistreated by those in Auradon for the sole reason of being related to them. Australia's early history was very similar, but their descendants pride themselves on their convict history, and some settlements have no connections to convicts (e.g. Adelaide). Seeing children being subjected to extreme racism because of their parents' crimes is just too hard to swallow for many Australians, and its Disney Channel hardly shows the film and its two sequels. It doesn't help that Australia has its own Isle of the Lost in Nauru, where children have been locked up.
• Enemy at the Gates:
  • Russian audiences hate this movie, and two successive Russian Culture Ministers along with the Russian Military Historical Society have classified it as "deliberately anti-Russian propaganda". The main reasons for that are the weird behaviours of various characters, the fact that Russians consider this movie too lighthearted and how they feel the Red Army is depicted as evil and incompetent (a general problem Russians have with Western-made productions about them).
  • German audiences were also critical of the movie as they felt that it glorified the war and downplayed its history. It doesn't help the film's case that when it was presented at Berlinale film festival, it was viciously booed and met with contempt by the audience. The negative reception pissed off Jean-Jacques Annuad so much that he said he would never present another film at Berlinale as he called it "a slaughterhouse".
• The musical Evita and its 1996 film adaptation caused quite a bit of controversy in Argentina (Eva Peron's country of origin), to the point that there were protests against the filming of the film in Buenos Aires. Most criticism focused on the historical inaccuracies, the actors (choosing a pop singer to represent one of the most important figures in Argentine history will always attract controversy) and the unrealistic representation of Argentina. The fact that it was directed by a British filmmaker didn't help either, taking into account United Kingdom tense relationship with Argentina.
• The Fantastic Beasts series has never caught on in the US but has always retained strength in Europe in East Asia, especially the big markets of Germany in the former and Japan in the latter. This is probably because even the Harry Potter films always skewed heavily internationally as well but now with more competition than that series ever faced. The outside controversies around the series such as Johnny Depp's domestic violence woes and J. K. Rowling's so called "gender-critical" beliefs don't really get coverage outside the US and her native UK (and as a result, most of the fanbase outright loathes her now). However, the films may not do well in ticket sales but they do well on streaming, PVOD, and physical medias sales in the states. The third film didn't even hit $100 million domestically but outsold Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness which made over 4x that on Blu-Ray and was the sixth-higehst grossing home seller in raw dollars in 2022.
• Failure to Launch was poorly received in many Central American countries, as the premise of an adult man who refuses to move out of his parent's home clashes with the family-oriented home life of many men and women. It's quite common for an adult couple in these countries to get married and move in with their parents or in-laws to support each other financially, take care of the elderly, and have the grandparents look after the children while the couple works.
• Godzilla (2014):
  • While this is easily averted for the film itself in the Japanese market (Franchise creator Toho Co. themselves heaped praise upon it), it's played straight with Godzilla's redesign, which a decent portion of the audience over there consider to be weaker, or, for some people, fatter, than the original.
  • The movie has gotten a pretty bad rep in places where Godzilla hasn't been established as a pop-culturally relevant franchise, and so most people have grown up with the previous American reboot instead. Being that one of the main focuses of the film was to approach it from a "fan perspective" and distance it as much as possible from the '98 movie, it's easy to see why this strategy backfired in places where audiences harbored no love for the Japanese Godzilla, especially since reviews agreed that its faithfulness to the source material was one of the movie's main selling points. The two movies' receptions are inverted compared to countries where the brand has had a history, though in France, the 2014 version has led the 1998 one into obscurity.
  • The film did really poorly in the South Korean market. Box office analysts have compared the South Korean market for this movie with Pacific Rim and noticed how it was an unusual outlier considering Godzilla did better than Pacific Rim in every other territory.
  • The 2019 sequel showed an even stronger regional divide. It underperformed in most of the world, bringing back less than half or less than a third of the original's audience, depending on the country. Many reasons have been thrown around, ranging from competition with other blockbuster films, overly spoiler-heavy advertisements to viewers feeling disillusioned over the first film's subversive nature and Godzilla just not being a popular brand name. But the movie was reasonably successful in Japan and China, who helped push it out of total flop territory.
  • The entire brand qualifies. Although it had a rough history even in its native country, it's considered a cultural and commercial mainstay that still produces successful films every now and then. Godzilla movies have a cult following in the United States as well, and they have their share of fans in other territories too, such as Germany (one thing these two places have in common is that they released classic Japanese monster films back when they were still relevant and there weren't a whole lot of Western effects-films to give them competition, which means there's a lot of nostalgia for them). In the rest of the world, like in France, it's mostly the American adaptations that got any lasting attention (with a few people also recognizing the significance of the original), whereas the other ~30 films are seen as the epitome of low-grade schlock due to lack of, or terrible exports. Values Dissonance is also in effect, since most audiences find the characterful and fantastical Japanese monsters unappealing and silly, especially combined with the rubber suit effects.
    • In France, for the aforementioned reasons below, the Japanese Godzilla media is really obscure there, compared to the American remakes. It doesn't help that only some of the Showa era movies and Godzilla: Final Wars (though it has been a literal box-office bomb there) and Reign era media (Shin Godzilla having been a partial exception as it has only been released thre in Paris and Toulouse, the animes got released on Netflix) has been released there. However, it's the MonsterVerse version that is the most popular there as it has led the Roland Emmerich version into obscurity there and, yet, even though the Reiwa era series and movies are also obscure there, they get more positive reviews than for Emmerich's Godzilla movie, which got mixed reviews at best there.
  • As explored in this essay by Bulgarian kaiju fan and animator Vrahno, Godzilla, and the kaiju genre as a whole, is incredibly unpopular in Eastern Europe. This is largely due to their near-total lack of history and awareness of the genre, a disdain for films featuring "absurd" fantastical elements, and no small amount of outright anti-Japanese racism. Only the Roland Emmerich Godzilla (1998) holds any cred (due in large part to having marketed itself over there as anything but a respectful adaptation), and it's still generally held as a dumb schlocky action flick. Vrahno even provided the example of a scene in that film that is infamous in both America and Bulgaria for opposite reasons, that being the scene where the film's Godzilla lets out a puff of breath that creates a small, weird-looking explosion. In America, this scene is infamous because it's seen as a half-assed attempt to reference Godzilla's classic atomic breath, but in Bulgaria, the scene is infamous because the idea of the monster having any kind of unusual powers is considered dumb.
  • For a character-specific example, Minilla. In Japan, Minilla is quite well-liked, performing well in popularity polls, received an Expy in the Heisei era, and got a notably large role in Godzilla: Final Wars. In international territories, he's almost universally despised, with criticism being directed at his ugly, baby-like design and the more juvenile nature of the films he played a prominent role in. This is largely because while Japanese audiences grew up with Minilla, the people who watch old Godzilla films in international territories are almost guaranteed to be outside of the age bracket to enjoy what's pretty blatantly a Kid-Appeal Character.
• The Bollywood film Gunday is a footnote in most of the world, did pretty well in its home country of India, and got okay critical reviews. In Bangladesh, it's universally despised, for some major Artistic License – History taken with the Bangladesh Liberation War in a prologue sequence. Specifically, portraying the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 as the reason Bangladesh exists, when in fact Bangladesh already launched their independence war earlier that year and, depending on who you ask, were already winning. For an American comparison, this is like if a film said your country only exists because France helped you out in the Revolutionary War. Also, one scene depicting Bangladeshis identifying as Indian and speaking Hindi angered audiences due to the Pakistani government historically trying to suppress the Bengali language and national identity. The film studio eventually made an official apology for their portrayal. The film was actually rated #1 on the IMDB Bottom 100 for about a year, for exactly this reason, with thousands of angry Bengalis one-starring the film.
• If the reception of Hellboy (2019) is already divisive in its native U.S., the reception outside America is even worse. Mexico being the most notable case, partly because being the home of Guillermo del Toro, the director of the previous two films, which for obvious reasons both he and his films are deeply revered there, and also because the film was defeated in box office by a local Mexican film, (No Manches, Frida 2) something that's rather unusual there. ^ExplanationWith some very venerable exceptions, most Mexican films since the end of the golden era of Mexican cinema (1920s to 1960s) rarely were able to compete, much less lead, the local box office against either Hollywood or other foreign films, partly because of either lack of advertising or because most of these films past the 1960s were terrible shlockfests unable to even make a earning, and while the Mexican movie industry did managed to do very good films at later 1990s, most Mexican films were and are still unable to compete against foreign productions. The fact Cultural Cringe is prevalent in Mexican culture doesn't help.
• Hostel got absolutely slated by Czech and Slovakian critics and audiences, which is understandable given how the region is inaccurately portrayed in the film as a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden hellhole permanently stuck in the 1980s.

Specific movies/franchises/creators I-P

• Jackie Chan is beloved throughout the West, and sells well within China. However, he has become rather unpopular in Taiwan (and to an extent a Broken Base in his home of Hong Kong), due to very pro-Mainland political opinions. During some of his publicity tours, he has repeatedly praised Beijing's leadership, suggested that Taiwan be returned to mainland Chinese rule, and accused Western democracy of leading to only protest and problems.
• As beloved as James Bond may be around the world, there are two notable films that aren't well received outside of Britain.
  • Die Another Day is hated in both North and South Korea. The North Koreans weren't amused for making the movie's Big Bad a pastiche of Kim Jong Il, while the South Koreans were outraged by the fact that their defense forces were depicted being ordered around by Americans and that the theatrical cut included a love scene near a statue of the Buddha.
  • Spectre was extremely successful in its native UK^note Though it still caught flak from some Classic Bond fans who felt, among other things, that the rebooted Blofeld was a great disappointment compared to the classic Donald Pleasence portrayal., but received a mixed reception in the US. Some American critics disliked how the film tried to tie together the events of the previous Daniel Craig movies, making it seem like a poor attempt to form a cinematic universe. Likewise, they also criticized Spectre for lacking originality since it blatantly copied ideas from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and previous Bond movies. Not that their opinions stopped the movie from grossing over $200 million in the US.
• John Q. did alright in the US (i.e. covered its cost and made the equivalent of it again), but hardly raised interest overseas. Almost every foreign critic began his review of the film with the statement that, for better or worse, the premise of a man taking an ER at gunpoint after being denied life-saving surgery was something that could only happen in an American movie.
  • The very premise of the movie would likely be extremely confusing to those audiences outside of the U.S. since they most other first-world countries have universal health care and medical treatments, especially emergency/lifesaving medical treatments, are never denied. Many foreigners, when they find out about the American health care system, find it horrifying.
• Independence Day has a fairly large fanbase in its native United States, but in almost every other country, it's unpopular due to its incredibly exaggerated nationalistic themes. However, both the film and its sequel made the majority of their box office revenue overseas, suggesting there's some international audience for it.
• While China usually adores the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, so much so that Marvel occasionally shoots extra scenes intended only for the Chinese release (as was the case with Iron Man 3), Chinese audiences did not respond well at all to Black Panther, in direct contrast to the massive, record-breaking success it achieved almost everywhere else. It actually did worse in China than Justice League (to put this in perspective, Black Panther sold more tickets in the US in its first four days than Justice League did in its entire run), ostensibly as a consequence of what was seen as excessive political correctness. ^note "Ostensibly" because China has a well-documented verifiable history of disliking or responding poorly to movies with black leads. The only black actors who break out in the middle kingdom are well-established blockbuster stars like Will Smith or Samuel L. Jackson. Most notably Chinese media for The Force Awakens going so far as to shrink newcomer John Boyega way down on the official poster. The 2014 Sony hack involved emails about them wanting to make an action trilogy with Denzel Washington as the lead. Once they market researched the idea in China, they scrapped the project because big budget movies almost have to open in China to make their money back these days and it just wasn't worth the risk to sink that much money into it.
• Mr. Nobody was a hit in Belgium, where it grossed nearly one million dollars, which is rather high for a Belgian box office and loved by critics, who still to this day think that it is the best Belgian film ever made. In France, the response was more mixed by critics, but it nevertheless managed to gross 1 million dollars there as well. In the United States, it also had a mixed critical response, but it only managed to gross $3600 there, which makes it a candidate for the award of "lowest grossing film in the U.S. as of 2013".
• Navalny: Ukrainians are indifferent to the film and Alexei Navalny in general, if not hostile, due to the man treating the internationally condemned annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 as fait accompli and that it should remain part of Russia, and him generally not distancing himself enough from Russian imperialistic rhetoric until the full scale war that started in 2022 (which he condemned) and his partisans never really giving agency to Ukraine and focusing solely on the suffering of Russian people under Vladimir Putin. The sentiment was made even clearer upon his death in February 2024 and yet again the following month after the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature win of 20 Days in Mariupol was not broadcast internationally while the win of Navalny in the same category (and his wife's speech) was broadcast the previous year.
• While Pacific Rim was a modest hit in the U.S. (but much more popular throughout most of Asia and Oceanic areas), the film did poorly in Europe, partly because most of the action happens only by the Pacific Rim. The U.K. (due to highly-respected actor Idris Elba playing one of the main characters) and Russia (due to the popularity of the couple that pilot Cherno Alpha, and that Russia is the only European country with a Pacific coast) are exceptions to the rule. Ironically, the movie did not do well in Japan either, despite being a love letter to the Kaiju and Mecha genres. Then again, the movie's leading lady Rinko Kikuchi was never really popular back in Japan. Alternate theories for the film's poor performance in Japan was that the country already had many of its own Humongous Mecha and Kaiju works and thus had little interest in seeing a Westernized version.
• Paths of Glory wasn't even released in France until 1970, for a number of reasons. One of them is the movie's negative depiction of the French Army. Specifically, it reinforces the stereotype that all World War I officers partied in their chateaus while their men died on the field, which is in direct contrast to the historical record that officers were statistically more likely to die in battle than ordinary soldiers. But the biggest reason the film caused outrage in France was Values Dissonance regarding World War I itself. Essentially, while World War I in the Anglosphere's popular conscious is often viewed as futile and pointless (although this view has been challenged and scrutinized in recent decades), in France it's usually seen as a war of national defense against an aggressive and militaristic invader (which has also been challenged since about the 2000s, the "futile and pointless slaughter" has gained steam as well there). To give a rough analogy, imagine if the same general plot and message was transplanted to the Pacific Theatre of World War II, only with American soldiers and generals.
• Although The Patriot (2000) received a polarized (but generally positive) reception in its native United States, it was absolutely hated in the United Kingdom for its depiction of British troops as bloodthirsty savages and its multiple historical inaccuracies.
• While most of Paul Verhoeven's films are beloved in America, with many of them seen as the epitome of satirical Gorn-fest action movies, his homeland-made material is practically unknown outside of the Netherlands (and Europe to an extent). Even Zwartboek, his first return to Dutch cinema in nearly two decades, performed exceptionally well back in the Netherlands, but barely made a blip in North America. Values Dissonance also plays a role, due to a large amount of sex and Male Frontal Nudity in his Dutch films, which would earn an NC-17 rating in America. (Especially since one of his American movies, Showgirls, ended up killing the NC-17 rating in America.)

Specific movies/franchises/creators Q-Z

• Revolution (1985) got negative reviews in most countries, but American critics were especially harsh to it. To wit, it's a historical Epic Movie about The American Revolution... made by British filmmakers, meaning that its very non-idealized portrait of the Revolution (despite it being told from the colonials' point of view) stood out that much more. The general reaction among Americans was that Goldcrest Films should have just stayed away from the subject, or at least written off the idea of this film making any money in the US.
• SHAZAM! failed to catch on in the normally superhero loving Chinese market. According to reviews on their IMDB equivalent, Douban, where it has a fairly bad score of 6.2, the story didn't translate well culturally. In a society that reveres its elders, Troubled, but Cute protagonist Billy came off as a brat for disrespecting his foster parents. There's also not really an equivalent of growing up in a foster home there. It's also a bit more lower stakes than other superhero movies, and the big action sequences of its genre peers translate better than a "talky", very American-style-humor movie. Its $43 million performance is especially terrible compared to its immediate predecessor in the franchise, Aquaman, which gained almost $300 million in the Chinese box office with its spectacle and universally understood story of King Arthur UNDERWATER!
• The Holocaust documentary Shoah was critically acclaimed almost everywhere, winning several "best documentary of the year" awards and being voted #2 of all time by Sight and Sound. In Poland, however, the movie is utterly loathed, including by the Central Polish-Jewish Committee who filed a letter of protest with the French Embassy in Warsaw in response to the film. It was never going to be popular, considering it's about Poland's assisting in the Holocaust. But the film's refusal to acknowledge the many Poles who did save Jews (there were far more Polish Righteous Among Nations, gentiles who helped Jews during the Holocaust, than any other nationality in the world) or who also suffered ethnic persecution by the Nazis, pretty much torpedoed the chance of Poles ever appreciating the film.
• The Sound of Music is one of the most popular musicals of all time... except in Germany and Austria. Most people in those countries have never watched the movie and those who have, despise it.
• Star Wars:
  • The Force Awakens made some headlines for fizzling out in a number of foreign markets. Its domestic box office is the highest ever, but in non-English-speaking markets, its performance was fairly average^note with the notable exception of France, in which it has outgrossed every Marvel Cinematic universe movie to date and didn't exactly break any records. Some analysts believe that this resulted from a story that wasn't accessible to newcomers and the fact that other Star Wars imitators had already stolen its thunder. For example, it did middling business in Japan^note It didn't do badly by any means, it just wasn't the record breaker that it was in the US, largely due to coming out the same time as the second Yo Kai Watch film. This has rankled many fans, due to Yo-Kai Watch being an example of this itself in both anime and video games.
  • The same was true with Rogue One and especially The Last Jedi, which both landed with a thud in China despite being smash hits in the US, the latter having the second highest-grossing opening weekend in the history of the American box-office at the time of its release. The Last Jedi in particular was eviscerated by both audiences and critics alike, with the most upvoted review on popular aggregator Douban (China's own Rotten Tomatoes) calling it "an insult to intelligence." It was noted that Star Wars in general just does not appeal to Chinese audiences (despite the franchise drawing a great deal from the country's tradition of Wuxia fiction), especially with the earlier films having never been released there, the franchise being only a niche property in that country. It got to the point that Solo got a Market-Based Title change to "Ranger Solo" to downplay any Star Wars connection. It didn't work.
  • The franchise isn't popular in India either. In general, most Hollywood films struggle in India due to competition from local movies and state-imposed restrictions. Just like in China, the Indian melodrama and pop-culture cinema still uses many of the melodramatic and epic tropes that Star Wars repackaged in science-fiction dressing, thereby removing most of its freshness compared to with Western audiences. It's rather notable that among Indian movie audiences, Harrison Ford is more well known for his turn in Air Force One than as Han Solo.
  • The first three Star Wars were released in the 1970s, before a market for Western films had developed in either China or India. As a result the later films were seen as stand-alone movies, rather than part of a well-known franchise.
• In general, sci-fi space stories almost always flop in China. The Last Jedi was the biggest box office bomb of 2017 in China, but the second-biggest one happens to be Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the year's other high-profile movie set in space. No one is entirely sure why, not even the Chinese, although possible explanations range from the futuristic feel of space being anathema to the traditions-focused culture of China to the country's lack of any major space programs (Dongfanghong 1 and Jade Rabbit notwithstanding, both of which had more attention from other countries than China) resulting in a lack of interest in outer space among the Chinese as a whole.
  • For that matter, Valerian didn't perform well at the USA box office, either. The French comic series it was based upon is virtually unknown by American audiences.
• The 1968 mondo film Sweden: Heaven and Hell, best known nowadays as the source of "Mah Nà Mah Nà", was never released theatrically in the titular nation, and attracted a flurry of complaints from audiences when it was finally shown there on television in 1971. This was largely down to the film's heavily sensationalized and unflattering portrayal of the country as a Crapsaccharine World with high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction. In fact, director Luigi Scattini had promised the Swedish re-enactors that the film would never be shown in their country, so once they finally got the chance to see the end results, they were understandably outraged by how the filmmakers had assembled and edited the footage in order to push a false and salacious narrative.
• The Three Stooges: In the US, they are an institution, broadcast for decades and very popular with all ages to the point that almost every American comedy will have a Three Stooges Shout-Out at one point, even if it took until the '80s for critics to get on board too. In the rest of the world, especially Europe, Laurel and Hardy and The Marx Brothers have always been far more famous and popular, while the Stooges are seen as lowbrow and unsophisticated. A major reason for this is that the quality of the latter's movies, and with it their popularity, went into decline in the '40s, allowing the Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and Bob Hope to take their crown as a result. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Nazi occupation cut off the import of new movies, including both the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy's lesser films and the new rising stars of Hollywood comedy. At the same time, after the war Laurel and Hardy almost immediately started touring Europe with a small stage show until 1954, getting back in contact with their old fans. As a result, Europeans were far more interested in the big names of Golden Age Hollywood comedy than any of the new comedians they never heard about.
  • The same issue applies to Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello. While they weren't necessarily seen as lowbrow like the Stooges, they did rely a lot more heavily on verbal humor that didn't translate well in non-English-speaking countries.^note Though the Marx Brothers' comedy is also very verbal, they had a few good foreign dubs at the time, especially in Italy where they have always been very beloved. Harpo also had a background in silent film comedy, which crossed all language barriers. Furthermore, Hope, despite being born in England (though his family immigrated to the US when he was four), was best known for his tours with the United Service Organizations providing live entertainment for US soldiers. The patriotic connection wasn't there for Europeans.
• Yongary: Monster from the Deep - just another run-of-the-mill Kaiju film, right? In its native Korea, however, the monster is popular enough to be a spokesperson for Harim, a Korean food manufacturing company, with their "Yonggary Chicken Tenders" (starring chibi-Yongary and his pals Yongyongi and Yongnali), complete with animated promos and stage shows.
• Although Young Einstein did well in its native Australia, the reaction from North American critics was mostly negative, with the film just barely turning a profit in the U.S. despite a massive publicity campaign by Warner Bros., who had hoped to replicate the success of "Crocodile" Dundee. This has largely been attributed to its style of humour not translating well overseas.

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