Could we be worse than Americans, asks DONALD CLARKE

Do you know what Americans are like? I’ll tell you. They are fat religious maniacs in baseball caps and plaid shorts. Their hobbies include ecological catastrophe, eating massive spheres of deep-fried animal fat and dropping napalm on third- world nations. Almost none of them can read, they have no sense of irony and they still won’t admit that the British invented punk.

Then we come to their cinema. Just look at the rubbish they gave us last year: Madagascar 2, The Mummy 3, Indiana Jones 4. Ask an American to watch a film that is anything other than a sequel to an earlier cinematic lobotomy and he or she will, most likely, take out a legally owned assault rifle and murder your entire family.

It’s so much nicer being a citizen of The Rest of the World, we spend our days drinking aromatic black coffee, reading early, unpublished novels by Michel Houellebecq and contemplating the foolishness of religious fundamentalism.

The Americans do, of course, try to sell us their awful, decadent “movies”, but, being cultured fellows, we shun the yawning multiplexes and seek out films about starving Welsh miners and juvenile Peruvian viola players. The Rest of the World rules.

Is it time for the punchline yet? The truth is that, for many decades, Hollywood analysts have trusted The Rest of the World to turn up to their most moronic films in disproportionately large numbers. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger still retain their A-List status in Europe and Asia. Everyone in Des Moines now makes fun of Tom Cruise, but put him in a film with a talking guinea pig and the good folk of Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur will drift to the cinema in excited swarms.

A glance at the box-office returns for 2008 offers undeniable evidence of this unhappy truth. These days, a major release can expect to generate around 55 per cent of its revenue from The Rest of the World. ( Mamma Mia!took 76 per cent of its money, money, money outside America, but, ABBA being largely a Rest of the World phenomenon, we can set that aside.) Yet The Dark Knight, by far the most intelligent of the summer's popcorn pictures, could only manage a paltry 47 per cent in these outlying territories.

Instead, we were flocking to see Madagascar 2(69 per cent), Hancock(63 per cent) and, with a truly astonishing 74 per cent, the incoherent, unnecessary The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Meanwhile, Slumdog Millionaireand The Wrestler– the first a film actually set in The Rest of the World, the second a picture with a supposed European sensibility – only managed, respectively, 49 per cent and (gulp) 36 per cent.

We do not have space to consider reasons for The Rest of the World’s apparent stupidity, but the figures do suggest that we are fonder of the crappiest American crap than the Americans themselves. Have some humility, people. Have some dignity. Have a cheeseburger.