6. In Russia With Love
You may or may not be aware that quite recently China has emerged as one of the biggest growing markets for Hollywood movies in the entire world. Hollywood has even teamed up with China on a number of recent ventures, as to capitalise on all this whilst it's hot and Chinese people like watching comic book movies:
Iron Man 3 was one of these recent ventures, by the way. You might not have realised, though, that pretty much the same thing is happening in Russia. How have Hollywood tried to cash in on this goldmine, then? Haven't you noticed? By setting
every single action movie in Russia, of course. And now it's getting a tad ridiculous. "Russia" has always been shorthand for "evil" in Hollywood anyway, what with the fall of the Soviet Union in the '90s, but given that Russia has recently poured a ton of money into new movie theatres and better projectors, Hollywood has taken to brown-nosing the market. Which means that we got a
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol that was set partly in Moscow, a
Transformers movie that was filmed in Russia and had scenes set in Chernobyl, not to mention movies like
A Good Day To Die Hard, which was set in the country entirely. There's nothing wrong with setting movies in Russia, of course, but when every blockbuster is suddenly taking place in Moscow with our hero facing off against bland, stereotypical Russian bad guys, it gets tiring: the world is huge, and there are nearly 200 countries... a little variation goes a long way.