LexX said:

I think people in the US and UK (the places where the movies were made) seem to think that they have more global significance than what it really is.

Yeah, I think global significance is a pretty big stretch for any cultural work. The Bible and Greek/Roman mythology may have meant everything in Europe for a thousand years, but they meant squat to the Maori. Global communication and media changes this a little, but not as much as you'd think--language and cultural barriers are still pretty tough to bridge.