Americans hate subtitles

I'm going to agree with the OP. I work in a video store in Seattle, and our foreign titles don't do as well unless they are Crouching Tiger or Life is Beautiful. When I recommend The Class, My Father My Lord, Battle of Algiers, to name just 3, I often get "I don't want subtitles". My friends and I love them, many Americans do not. In my experience.




I like to watch.

>>> where the hell do you get these generalizations from?

same place you get yours, from nowhere.
The little world around you is just that, that microcosim bears little relevance to the rest of America. personal experience can be very misleading if you read too much in to it.

Becasue the people who you know, from the same income, education, geographic background, whatever; watch foreign language movies; most peeps in America do not.

I would say that Crouching Tiger is the exception that proves the rule.

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I am a Canadian and have never once found a British film hard to understand.

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make superlemons.-Principal Scudworth

The OP as much as he's generalizing has a lot of merit (and it goes for Canadians too). I don't know about the rest of the world but the average Joe Shmo movie goer here in Canada and the US who pack the theaters to watch the big Hollywood blockbusters typically don't care to go see a non English language film.

I've had friends say, "I don't want to read", "the subtitles are too fast and I can't keep up". I'm sure other reasons include the fact that foreign language films typically don't have a huge marketing budget and hence Joe Schmo will not know about it as he will not be bombarded with advertising, Joe Schmo only cares about big explosions and special effects found in Hollywood blockbuster movies.

Another reason is that the average movie goer wants to be "entertained" as opposed to actually watching a good story, which is typically what carries the foreign language movies that make it to the theaters. Then again, just because a movie is made in a foreign language it doesn't mean it will be great, I've seen plenty of horrible foreign language movies.

As far as the exceptions go, Life is Beautiful was distributed by Miramax and had some money behind it to promote it. When was the last time you saw actors from say a German movie appear on Letterman or Leno? lol

IMO, it's just a lack of ignorance, these old friends I referenced were the perfect examples. They were ignorant in every aspect of their life, movie going included who wouldn't even fathom the idea of watching a movie with sub-titles let alone an English speaking movie from the UK.

Heck I put sub-titles on for US made movies but that's because I think I have a problem with my sound system/acoustics in my movie room. Lol The Damned United was an excellent movie btw.

I tried to get hold of "The White Ribbon" (German film) at my local Blockbusters here in (posh?) Cheltenham, England (home of the top-notch Cheltenham Ladies College) and was told there was no demand for foreign films.

However, having watched two foreign films at home on DVD this weekend I'm now more than happy to give the screen reading a miss for a while.

(As an aside, Ukrainians seem to like all their foreign films dubbed, mostly atrociously. It made Kill Bill 2 a bit of a problem, not helped by the fact that I hadn't seen Kill Bill 1.)

I think the moral of the story is that there are idiots everywhere.

Though subtitling English does seem a tad strange.