A question for the folks who live in the States

I live in the rural mid-west, close to three hours to the nearest "city", so our local theaters don't run foreign films. One of the great things about living in this particular era is having resources like Netflix. When Netflix first arrived, I loved getting to have great foreign films delivered right to my home. So many to choose from, what a treat.

Now that I have Netflix on-line, I get to enjoy not just the films, but also some wonderful foreign tv programming and short-term series.



I support, defend and always employ the Oxford comma.

I think a general and short answer for the great question dbroggi poses is: People in the U.S. simply don't want to read subtitles. They want to watch the movie, not read it. Americans (including myself, so stop the bashing beforehand) are lazy, and are unfortunately blissfully ignorant to our arrogant ways (meaning everyone should speak English, and if they don't, we're not interested).

Most of the answers here seem to me to be way off the mark--strangely given the existance of sites such as box office mojo.

To answer your question straight-up: in the U.S. most movies period, full stop, 'are rejected' AT THE FIRST-RUN THEATER BOX OFFICE. Not most foreign language films, but most movies. All but a small handful get only three-week showing in first-run movie theaters.

There are, to remind you, about 300,000,000 folks residing in the U.S. Do all of that vast number "reject" foreign language films--No. That's just silly. Millions of people in the U.S. consume foreign language film regularly. A "foreign" film that would be considered a 'huge' hit in its native country, will often make more in U.S. secondary markets (Movie TV networks (HBO etc.), DVDs, Streaming, so-called 'arthouse' film theaters, etc.) than it will in its home country.

However, first run theater showings in the US will often cost $12 a ticket (yes, they cost more to see in the theater than to order off Amazon on DVD). Given this cost, and the fact that every one knows they will be able to rent most movies, including foreign language films if they just wait a month or two, the movies that people tend to go see in the theater are what are often called "water-cooler" movies--they are the movies that draw lots and lots of eyeballs such that people feel they are "missing out" on the conversation if they haven't seen it. This is the nature of the "popular culture" beast. If all your friends on facebook are arguing over whether "Sniper" is a good movie, whether it portays heroism, whether it should be celebrated or condemned--you feel you are missing out on the nature of contemporary culture if you haven't seen it also. Thus you pay your $12 bucks, even though it isn't all that rational not to just wait 8 weeks and pay 2 or 3.

Ergo--Sniper = huge numbers of dollars ($100,000,000 first week/$500,000,000 total and those are "first run" box office dollars).

Foreign language films simply have an impossilbly hard up-hill climb to compete with that, especially since there are already a ton of English language movies in first-run theaters (many of which are very good, but just don't "catch on").

Ignorance of this kind of mechanism, in this day and age, when all of this has been well documented, as well as the concomitant anti-US sentiment that the US movie going habits tend to generate, continues to amaze me, frankly.

I can't understand why so many people (from any country) has so much problems watching a movie with subtitles. Are they too lazy to read or what?

yep... english is not my native lang. get over it.

To answer your question, the Jews have TOTAL control of our media(film, tv, music, printed media, etc.) and they use all of their power and influence to keep ANYTHING that's NOT the crap that they make in Hollywood, out of our country. Their poor standard of movie making doesn't look as bad as it is when it can't readily be compared to anything else. They keep us on a steady diet of over-the-top violence, hypersexual themes with no morality in sight, and whatever they want the public to buy into(homosexuality, racism/white supremacy, feminist/anti-male rhetoric("I'm independent so I want a divorce", "I don't need a man, just his money for child support so I can raise MY kids WITHOUT a MALE influence around", etc.), WHO we should vote for, WHO we should hate/kill, etc). These scumbags use the media to influence the population to agree to send their children overseas to die in CIA-created wars. Whenever they want to invade some nation, patriotic-tinged war movies are released showing "brave, honorable, duty-bound American soldiers defending our great nation".(How can one be "defending" their nation when they're in someone ELSE'S nation? Hmmm.) Right now, they are using their control of the media to influence white citizens to turn against Blacks, Latinos, Muslims(or anyone that looks Middle Eastern) and refugees so that a civil war will ensue soon.

America is NOT the free nation that it professes to be. And it's definitely not the "greatest nation in the world".

Believe it or not, most large cineplexes have smaller auditoriums for foreign language and indie films (AMC even prides themselves on this with their "AMC Independent" brand). In addition to larger cities with arthouse cinemas.

Don't people in other countries have anything better to do than to conjure up complaints about the U.S.?

I am not from the USA but I am in North America (Canada). I LOVE foreign movies, 60% of my movie collection if foreign movies.

America doe some great tv shows and some good movies but man they really need to stop remaking all these wonderful foreign movies and doing such a crap job! For every quality one like "The Departed" we get crap like OldBoy, Martys and Secret In Their Eyes!