Before the film, there were murmurs that due to an apparent America fatigue (fatigue is putting it mildly, I suppose) on the part of the rest of the world, and especially in places that don’t really like us, the movie was going to do badly overseas, or at least worse than the other recent Marvel films. Now that the movie’s been out for a while and probably exported already, how accurate were those rumors, anyone know? Compared to the other films like Thor, the Iron Mans (Iron Men?), and Hulk, did CA do relatively worse?
Box Office Mojo figures:
Captain America: $173,520,394 Domestic - $175,000,000 Foreign
Thor: $181,030,624 Domestic - $267,482,200 Foreign
Iron Man 2: $312,433,331 Domestic - $311,500,000 Foreign
X-Men First Class: $146,361,943 Domestic - $206,208,385 Foreign
So it looks like they’re all in the same neighbourhood. And it’s probably still got some distance to go (it hasn’t opened in Japan yet).
Yeah, looking through the records for other comic book movies, it’s looks like the they usually do about the same foreign and domestic, give or take 10 mil or so. Thor did pretty impressive worldwide.
And the movie wasn’t really very specifically American, either. Steve Rogers holds tightly to his ideals, and those ideals are ones which Americans like to associate themselves with, but they’re also ideals the rest of the world like to associate themselves with.
I saw it in Daegu, Korea. The theater was pretty packed and it stayed open for about five weeks.
For an mainstream American movie, Thor had a very international cast. You had Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, and Tadanobu Asano.
Did Thor do well in Scandinavia? Truth is, somehow I never even wondered before if Scandinavians like the comic-book Thor, or if they hate it, or if they have no more special feelings about it than, say, an Italian would.
I don’t know how well it did, but it got some impressively bad reviews. Out of the five main newspaper in Stockholm it go only one good review:
dn.se (left wing quality) 1/5
aftonbladet (tabloid) 2/5
svd.se (right wing quality) 4/6
expressen (tabloid) 2/5
http://www.expressen.se/1.2416659
metro (free paper, Swedish brand but seen worldwide) 1/5
For me the most amusing one was DN’s. DN at the best of times can be very snobbish when it comes to the arts, but with this one they were so up their own arse it wasn’t funny. In an amazing example of failing to get the point, despite the film being called “Thor” the reviewer insisted on using the Nordic name for the God, Tor, throughout the review.
Did Thor do better in the Scandinavian countries?
It did better than Captain America here in Norway. Thor sold 103 948 tickets, CA sold 71 822. This means that Thor is the 20th most seen movie so far this year, CA is at 28th. As a comparison: Harry Potter is number 1 at 561 909 (and is still in theaters). Full list in Google-Translate Norwegian->English here
I remember the reviews for Thor, mostly the same as amanset has from Sweden. “Quite bad, but a watchable movie if you can manage to forget everything you were told in school about the old god”
An added bonus for the Norwegian audience was the characters who spoke “Norwegian” in CA. (In the church at the beginning). It was rather horrendous, and had to be subtitled. Also weird was the place called “Tonsberg” in both movies, with geography nothing like the town of Tønsberg. I was born there, and there are no mountains like those shown in Thor nearby. 
FTR: I can’t say I wasted my money going to either of those movies, but I didn’t expect any deep meaning behind them.
To me, the interesting comparison is with Batman Begins – starting a franchise with a comic-book superhero who doesn’t really have any powers – where Captain America has already grossed more overseas, but isn’t doing nearly as well in the United States (and may well be on track to do better in an overall gross-to-budget analysis, by winning so big internationally as to more than negate BB’s advantage stateside).
Looking at the numbers broken down by countries, it appears to me that Captain America did worse than the other superhero movies in Europe and much worse in India. But it did better in Latin America. You can’t really make the comparison yet for the Middle East and East Asia because it opened too recently.
Did that bother you, or were you just amused?
In the movie “Independence Day”, the air base Will Smith’s character was supposed to be from was MCAS El Toro.
El Toro is/was not out in the middle of the desert like you see in the film.
IIRC, negotiations over exactly how to split the gross broke down in India, and so it didn’t get shown in multiplexes.
Just amused. I don’t expect someone who lives over 8000km away to know (or really care) about the exact geography of old Norwegian towns 
I don’t remember any Norse towns showing up in Thor. Well, no modern Norse towns: There was an ancient village the Aesir were defending from the Jötun, but I don’t remember it being named.
That’s the one. There is a caption that reads “Tonsberg, Norway 965 A.D.”. The (disputed) date of the founding of the city is 871.
This is, of course, another thing that binds the movies together; the small village defended by the Æsir in Thor is the same town where Red Skull finds the cube in Captain America 977 years later.
Well, I finally did my part and went to see Captain America. I think it was less impressive than Thor or Iron Man or X-Men. The characters and the stories seemed more one-dimensional and there were several times when there was a stupid moment that took me out of the movie. (A good movie can have stupid moments but you don’t notice them at the time because the movie’s going well - if you notice the stupid moments, it’s a sign the movie’s weak.)
I will say the CGI was amazing. Chris Evans was essentially a CGI effect for about the first third of the movie and it was seamless. (And again, the sign of great CGI work is that you don’t notice it when you’re watching it.)
And to keep this post on topic, the current grosses for Captain America are $175,908,703 Domestic and $186,778,439 Foreign.
That’s actually a myth. I actually think they like us more than WE like us. Pew did a survey and found this:
We still do very bad in the middle east, unfortunately, but that’s not going to affect a Hollywood movie much due to the region being a small market anyway.