No Export For You / Film

Films — Animation

• Bambi did eventually premiere in Japan, albeit 15 years after its US release. The reason was a little thing called "World War II". Osamu Tezuka did however get Walt Disney's permission to make an adaptation for the Japanese market.
• The third film in the Action Man DTV Trilogy, titled Código Gangrena, was released exclusively in Latin American with Spanish audio.
• DC League of Super-Pets didn't saw a release in mainland China, possibly due to Batman being voiced by Keanu Reeves, who was Banned in China for his participation of a virtual concert supporting Tibet on 3 March 2022. Tibet is one of the political taboos in mainland China.
• In The Incredibles, for some reason, the "Vowellet" feature was omitted from the European/Australian DVDs. Which is strange, given that this one movie is the only time most Europeans/Australians have heard of Sarah Vowell, the popular essayist and This American Life regular who voiced Violet.
• Thomas and the Magic Railroad was never released nor dubbed into Finnish, Polish, Italian, European Spanish, European Portuguese, Norwegian, Hungarian, and Swedish for unknown reasons, possibly either because of the negative reception it received or how expensive it is to dub in those languages.
• Shortly before the worldwide release date, Disney took part in an economic boycott of Russia due to an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, resulting in all the studio's films, including Turning Red, being delayed in Russia indefinitely. Eventually, the already finished Russian dub was released digitally in August 2022, but only for the Russian speakers in the Baltics and several CIS countries.

Films — Live-Action

• The "Roxy Hunter" movies have a hard time getting licensed to Japan, due to its similarities to Heartcatch Precure. That Nickelodeon shows were a very hard sell in the Japanese market probably also plays a factor.
• As it stands now, Disney Blu-ray 3D releases for the US and Canada are indefinitely suspended, but fortunately pretty much all of their international Blu-ray 3D releases are region free and playable on all Blu-ray players, and importing them is barely more expensive, if at all, than what a domestic release would have cost.
• In reaction to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia ordered by Vladimir Putin in February 2022, WarnerMedia decided not to release The Batman in Russia. Other American film studios followed suit, resulting in Russian audiences missing out on, among other things like "'Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore''; this is the same for their distribution on home video. That being said, piracy was more or less legalized/rendered more tolerated in Russia after that move, and some Russian theaters screened pirated HD versions of them (with illegal voiceover/dubbing teams like TV Shows, Red Head Sound or Flarrow Films emerging into the light).
• The Battle Royale movies, which came out in 2000 and 2003 in their native Japan, were not given an official release in America until 2012. Due to the nature of the movies and the then-current Columbine High School massacre, this led to long-standing (and false) rumors that the movies were banned in the US. They weren't, but Toei Company, the studio behind the films, mistakenly thought that they were; when they screened the first film for their lawyers after Columbine, they were told that they'd go to jail if they tried to release it in the US. As a result, they set up a series of wildly unreasonable demands to dissuade any potential American distributor, demanding a national cinema release and accompanying advertising campaign on par with the latest Hollywood blockbusters instead of the normal "select arthouse cinemas" route that does decent business for other subtitled foreign films. They eventually relented and settled for the latter route^note Specifically, a one-week run at the Cinefamily Theater in Los Angeles for nine days (later changed to fifteen days due to demand) starting December 23, 2011, followed by a DVD/Blu-Ray release on March 20, 2012, by Anchor Bay. after deciding that enough time had passed since Columbine that they could get away with it.
  • Which leads into another problem that the films had: the MPAA. Teenage slasher movies are nothing new, but there's a difference between a psychotic monster going on a rampage and the nation's government forcing a high school class (played by actual teenaged actors — no Dawson Casting here!) to become murderers. There is no way in hell a film with that kind of content would've gotten anything other than an NC-17 without getting Bowdlerised to the point of being unrecognizable, meaning you can forget about a wide release or big marketing campaign. Too much pain for too little money. It's likely that, ultimately, the only reason that anybody even touched the films to begin with is because of the runaway success of The Hunger Games, a series of American young adult novels with similar subject matter.
  • To get around the films' lack of an American release, New Line Cinema tried to secure the rights to make an American remake, along the lines of The Ring and The Grudge. But again, the nature of the story means trying to find 30-40 odd teenagers (or the next best thing), at least five of which you know the studio will want to be "big names", a distributor willing to market a movie like this, and way to make the movie make sense to an American demographic... yeah, let's just say the project's been in Development Hell for several years.
• The full version of Grindhouse, as opposed to the stand-alone versions of Planet Terror and Death Proof, was only released to theaters, cable, and Blu-ray in North America and to DVD in Canada and Japan.
• A great many old/classic movies from European countries (e.g., the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) have never been released (legitimately) on VHS or DVD in North America, even when they feature stars who are widely known in America, simply because there's apparently no real money to be made in said release. These movies can include some of these stars' better-known performances.
  • Case in point: Sara Montiel and Maria Felix. They're generally regarded as among the greatest stars of Spanish-language film, yet most of their best-known movies have never seen DVD release in the U.S. by a major distributor.
• Played straight and usually enforced in Argentina during the VHS-era. Furthermore, there were warnings, both on the cover and in the anti-piracy warning messages that those videos were for use and sale solely in Argentina. RaroVHS, a website dedicated to collect information and videos from Argentinian distributors has information regarding that, and you can see here.
• In Quebec, some movies are released on DVD without the French language track, even when that language track exists, was included with the theatrical release, and is used commonly on TV. One of the most glaring examples was Terminator 2, which was recently re-released with a French language track. Even weirder, some movies, like X-Men or Men in Black, have a French-language track, but it's the European dubbing instead of the Quebec dubbing, which is the one used on TV and in theaters.
• Inversion: Song of the South hasn't been seen in the United States and Canada since it last aired on the Disney Channel in 1993, though as late as 2001 it was available on VHS in the UK, Europe and Japan, and VideoVisa released an ultra-rare VHS and Betamax version in Mexico in 1986, which you can get on eBay if you're extremely lucky. A Laserdisc is available in North America, but only because some video stores were importing copies of it from Japan. A region-free DVD was released in Taiwan (though not distributed by Disney) and imported its way to North America.
• Vacation With Derek, the much-anticipated follow-up movie to the Canadian family series Life with Derek, for no discernible reason, failed to make its scheduled US air date of 10 December 2010. Made all the more jarring by the fact that it premiered on schedule in Australia. It finally made its US premiere, six months later. On Encore.
• Inverted with Young Einstein. Still no DVD release in Australia, despite being available in the US since 2005. This is for a film that reviewers frequently described as being 'too Australian' to appeal to an international audience.
• The Italian movie L'ultimo squalo, alias The Great White (or, depending on where you see it, The Last Shark), is available everywhere except America due to a lawsuit by Universal that led to an extremely short and abbreviated run in theatres.
• Johnny Depp's The Brave. Bad reviews from American critics at the premiere left Depp so depressed that he refuses to allow an American release. The film is available online and internationally though.
• A Clockwork Orange was this in the UK until 2000 due to (depending on the source) either copycat murders or death threats against the family of director Stanley Kubrick. Whatever the reason, Kubrick and Warner Bros. pulled the film from the UK voluntarily, and it wasn't until after Kubrick died that Warner allowed a British release of the film. It was this trope that shut down the Scala Film Club for several years starting in 1993; Warner successfully sued them for screening the film without their authorization.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) won't be released in India at least for the time being due to director David Fincher not allowing Sony to cut material from the film that would be deemed offensive to the local censorship boards; if and when it finally does get released there, it'll be Direct to Video at best, like The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) was in the UK due to its horrific content.
• Hannah Montana: The Movie never got a theatrical release in Japan, but averted that the movie was available as a Direct to Video release on iTunes Japan. However, they did release The Lizzie McGuire Movie in Japanese theaters. Same with Norbit, which got a DVD release than a theatrical one.
  • On the topic of Japan, some Hollywood movies don't even come to the country in either Theatrical or Direct to video, or both. Want to know if a US film ever came out in Japanese theaters or not? IMDB is your friend. (Check if the movie has a JP release date and/or has an Eirin (Japan's answer to the MPAA) certification.)
  • The inverse is also true if we're talking about movies available in Japanese online stores. the JP PlayStation Video store has Descendants but not in the US PlayStation Video store, of all things.
• Emma Roberts has had the misfortune of going to Britain to shoot two movies — Wild Child and 4.3.2.1 — which never got American theatrical release; both did, however, go Direct-to-DVD.
• The popular Taxi franchise has never been released in the US. Instead, a English-language remake of the first film starring Queen Latifah was made.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla was the only Japanese Godzilla movie to be released in Hungary, in 1989 (15 years after its original debut) — as a result, most people in the country believed 1998 American remake to have been the only actual Godzilla movie. None of the others, not in cinemas, on VHS or on DVD. Even so, it remains completely unknown to general audiences and is in fact so obscure that its release almost counts as an urban legend. No other Japanese Kaiju film got localized in the country, although there's a rumor that at least one Gamera movie got a subtitled VHS release, and a few sub-par eastern monster movies made it to cable in 2012 as part of a late-night trash-film series — among them the English version of Giant Monster Gamera (untranslated and with a shoddy video quality) — but no Godzilla. Due to this, Godzilla (2014) was only a moderate success at the box office, and failure with audiences.
  • Even before that, throughout almost all of Europe, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was unheard of for some strange reason, even though Toho had clearly put it up for export. Turkey is the only country known to have shown it in theaters. All Monsters Attack's absence was justified in that no known export version was prepared since it was a filler production made for children. Germany only recently created new dubs for both of the films.
  • Until TriStar Pictures released them as a cash-grab for Godzilla (1998), Godzilla vs. Biollante was the last Heisei Godzilla film released to the United States.^note generally believed to be due to Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah having a pre-mutated Godzillasaurus killing American soldiers during WWII, the villains being Western Terrorists, and the perception that these was due to the economic tensions between the US and Japan and the latter's reaction to the "Japan Takes Over the World" trope However, that didn't stop Trendmasters from using the Heisei films as the basis for the Godzilla toys, resulting in confusion due to things being different from the Showa films.^note The designs for the monsters; Mothra and Rodan having beam powers they didn't have before or (barring the Rebirth of Mothra films for its title character) since; the origins of King Ghidorah as a bioengineered weapon by time travelers, and Mechagodzilla and Moguera as anti-kaiju weapons instead of ones for Alien Invasions; and the presence of King Ghidorah's Mecha form, Battra; and Space Godzilla
• Most classic western creature-features were also unknown in some European regions prior to their DVD releases. A Hungarian blogger once put the blame on Soviet-era sensibilities when Ray Harryhausen asked him during a chat how his movies had fared in his homeland. Though some may question this reasoning, it is true that Russia itself had an uneasy relationship with giant monster films — Godzilla movies were only released there during the 90s, and the only Japanese monster movie to gain any meaningful recognition in Soviet Russia was Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds.
  • Even though the United Kingdom had a remarkably large amount of Kaiju films see releases on their shores from the 1950's all the way through to the late-70's, come the 1980's, these releases began to dwindle, and by the 2000s, had all but dried up. For some reason, even though the UK has quite a sizeable fandom for the Godzilla series, virtually no effort was made to bring anything more than just a handful of films in the franchise to British shelves until the late New Tens.
• Despite the unanimous acclaim and the fact that it has been released in Europe and Asia, there has been no attempt to release Gangs of Wasseypur in the US. This is especially unusual since Indian films are often released day-and-date (or close to) in most countries. However, there is some relief in that the film's director has no problem with people downloading the film but still.
• Kit Kittredge: An American Girl has never been released in the UK, not even on television.
  • Dubbed versions of the film were released in other territories though, with the German version ending up being the subject of numerous parodies.
• A curious inversion in the case of the boy-and-his-horse movie Amanda; it was barely released in some countries (notably South Africa) but at least it got released there, whereas it has never been issued in any form in its home country of the US (although Basil Poledouris's score is available).
• The French horror film Livid was released in 2011. The Weinsteins bought the rights for an American release but are still sitting on it. Fans have had to resort to either importing international releases or piracy to view the film.
• Much to the delight of fans, there was, in fact, one (and only one) DVD edition of Army of Darkness that includes remastered versions of the extended cut's extra footage, instead of the same dark, grainy, poor-quality VHS transfers that are in every other release. Much to their consternation, this version was only available in Region 3 (Asia) coding. It's easy enough for US and European fans to import, thankfully, but a region-free DVD player is needed to actually watch it. In the 2010s, however, things began to look up, with a 6-disc Blu-ray and DVD box set containing the remastered footage in Germany, and Scream Factory in the US giving a brand new 4K transfer of all three versions of the film, with the TV version included as a special feature.
• Disney's Live-Action Adaptation of Beauty and the Beast was voluntarily pulled from Malaysian release for some reason despite approval by the censorship board following the censorship of the infamous gay scene that practically got it rated R in Russia. However, Disney later postponed the film's release date until March 30 in case the Film Censorship Board decides to leave the scene in.
• Ken Russell's controversial 1971 British film The Devils has never been released on Blu-Ray or DVD in the United States and Canada (it was briefly available as a digital download, but it is no longer available). Considering that the film is based on a true story about nuns gone crazy, and the Christian Right is one of the most powerful political groups in the country, the film's American distributor Warner Bros. has long been accused of suppressing its release to avoid being called "anti-Christian" by conservatives. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has referred to Warner Bros.' actions as pure censorship.
• The British film Diamonds For Breakfast has an official MPAA rating, but for some reason, was never released in the United States.
• The 1988 movie Beyond the Pyramids: Legend of the White Lion was produced in English and stars American and African actors. Despite clearly being meant for the international market, possibly trying to follow the success of The Neverending Story, it was released only in Japan. The NES video game adaptation, Legend of the Ghost Lion, did reach the American market four years later.
• The 25th Anniversary Edition Recut of Bedknobs and Broomsticks was only released in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France (which brought along a new French dub for this cut in 2003) and Australia, as it has never been made available in the rest of the countries where the film was sold/dubbed as only the original theatrical cut has been sold over there (with the exception of Germany which had its infamous Nazi-less cut of the film).
• Like most other Asian Tokusatsu works, you won't be able to get (at least) Ah Boys to Men franchise and its comics from outside Malaysia and Singapore, and parts of Asia.
• Due to the fact that Shout Factory and Kino Lorber do not operate outside the United States, this affected The Pink Panther franchise when it comes to Blu-Ray, with only the 1963 film, The Return of the Pink Panther (the second sequel of the Peter Sellers era of the original continuity) and the Steve Martin-led 2006 reboot and its sequel being the only ones coming out on Blu-Ray outside North America.
• The United States vs. Billie Holiday has only seen a DVD release in the United Kingdom and Blu-ray releases in Germany and France. It has yet to see a DVD or Blu-ray release in America.
• Another Hulu original film, Happiest Season, was released on Blu-ray, but it was only released in Australia. Sony has no plans to release the film on DVD or Blu-ray in America.
• Contrary to popular belief, Fifty Shades of Grey is not Banned in China, but the studio did not even attempt to release the film there because they knew it had no chance of being approved by the Chinese censors. The sequels, however, were co-produced by the US, China and Japan, so they were permitted to be shown in Chinese cinemas.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story was produced for the Roku Channel which isn't available in certain countries. The real "Weird Al" Yankovic advised one fan, who lived in one such country, to find other ways of watching the movie until it became legally available.
• Despite being based on a book that was adapted into one of Studio Ghibli's biggest hits, the live-action Kiki's Delivery Service movie from 2014 has never been released outside of Asia, Norway and Germany.