Zachary M. Seward finds that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is scoring big in movie theaters worldwide:
America’s greatest export is entertainment, and its improbable brand ambassador is now Captain America. The second installment of Marvel’s movie franchise is drawing huge audiences outside the United States, even in areas of the world that might ordinarily reject a jingoistic superhero clad in red, white, and blue. Captain America: Winter Soldier pulled in $107 million overseas [the weekend before last], even more than its record-breaking $96 million draw in the US. It was the number one film in China ($39 million), South Korea ($20 million), the United Kingdom ($18 million), Mexico ($16 million), France ($12 million), Russia ($7 million), and Australia ($6 million).
Warner Brown explains the appeal in China:
Why has an avowedly all-American hero proved so popular here? Launching the film on a three-day holiday weekend shortly after its stars toured Beijing certainly didn’t hurt. But Winter Soldier also resonates because it keeps the hero’s fundamental patriotism intact while modernizing his conflict for a complicated new era, pitting him against enemies burrowed deep within the government he serves. ”[The new villain] is the very country he loves and protects,” writes one Douban reviewer. “To love one’s country isn’t the same as loving one’s government: This is the main draw of Captain America.”
Update from a few readers:
Twice now, your blog has gotten something about comics totally backwards.
The first time some months ago was by implying that Batman started out in the 1960s Adam West goofy stage, when in reality he killed people (although their deaths are only implied) quite often in his early appearances.
Now you are not just making remarks that are dead wrong about Captain America. You have the character totally wrong, and worse you quote someone who is as well. Captain America has never been the jingoistic “America first, America only” hero. He is the moral heart of the marvel universe. He has actually gone against the government and given up being Captain America, rather than go against his values in the early 1970s and in the mid 2000s he led the anti-government faction in the “Civil War” event. Captain America has only been that sort of character during his original run in WWII and the “commie smasher” era, the later of which has been removed from the character.
The idea that a good-hearted idealist that stands for truth, justice and freedom doesn’t have an overseas appeal because he is dressed up in the American flag is only a skin deep analysis of the character, which everyone seems to acknowledge but ignore anyway. To those familiar with the character the idea Iron Man is popular overseas is much more surprising (because he actually is that sort of character much more so).
Another:
I’ve been a little bit disappointed by the media’s coverage of Captain America: The Winter Soldier but in no way surprised. It starts with the disadvantage of being a comic book movie, which God forbid we take seriously on it’s own terms; but it might also be a symptom of the media’s downplaying dissent in the mainstream. The Winter Soldier is a work of pop entertainment, to be sure, but it takes on establishment civil liberty and defense policies fairly specifically. This has gone mostly unnoticed in the press, but even Brown seems to be only skimming the service on this film’s appeal. It’s essentially the first product of the mainstream American film industry to take on these issues with any genuine focus, let alone in the Obama era.
It’s important to point out that the first Captain America, 2011’s The First Avenger, is Marvel Studios’ second lowest grossing film, largely because it did so poorly internationally. It’s fair to say this is partly because the film was essentially a pastiche of a World War II propaganda film, and took a rah-rah attitude toward American military force. The Winter Soldier is not an intellectualized polemic by any means, but it does very viscerally place the ultimate symbol of Patriotic Heroism at odds with clear and pointed analogues for NSA domestic spying, drone warfare, the president’s Kill List, JSOC, preemptive warfare, and the manipulation of terror to pressure the public into accepting encroaching state power structures. This is a film largely about Captain America explicitly choosing to dismantle the corrupt American paramilitary espionage apparatus, and I think that might have something to do with it’s international appeal.
The Dish 