Buying a popcorn with imitation butter, candy of choice and a large fountain drink is a tradition for many who enjoy sitting in a big dark room for hours and watching light bounce around a white screen. Lately, many of the films projected from the back of the theater are not American-made.

Foreign films are becoming more popular in American movie theaters with movies like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the recent film “Hero.”

Ames is no exception to the rule. The Varsity Theatre, 2412 Lincoln Way, is playing three eastern Asian films with subtitles in a span of five weeks.

Many of the box office numbers have shown that this “something different” is just what the audience is looking for. According to The-movie-times.com, “Hero” grossed more in its opening weekend than Hollywood-produced films like “The Notebook,” “Raising Helen” and “King Arthur.”

“I think that people want to have a little bit of variety,” says Lee Dencklau, general manager of the Varsity Theatre. “You don’t want to see ‘Spider-Man’ every weekend.”

Starting this weekend, the Varsity Theatre will be playing “Zhou Yu’s Train,” a Chinese love story in which a woman must choose between two men. Although it may sound like a Hollywood plotline, Dencklau says it has something special.

“It’s not your average John Cusack crying in the rain kind of thing,” he says.

David Sheets, junior in electrical engineering and local filmmaker, says he agrees with Dencklau that foreign films bring something unique to the screen.

“People are tired of seeing the same format,” Sheets says. “They want to see something different — different storytelling, different techniques and different ideas.”

One of the reasons Sheets says audiences are drawn to foreign films is their ability to stray away from the typical Hollywood storyline.

“I think one of the things you find with foreign movies is they don’t follow the Hollywood template,” he says. “Hollywood seems to have a three-act format.”

Sheets says foreign films are able to pull more out of every point of the story.

“A lot of movies — out of Asia in particular — seem to be action movies,” he says. “[‘Hero’] is an action movie where you have more than the standard Hollywood action format with characters, emotions and a much fuller story.”

Sheets says another reason for foreign films growing popularity is their higher production quality.

“It seems like in old foreign movies, the lighting wasn’t right, or there were some sound problems. It looked really cheap,” he says. “Where today there is a lot more money in these countries so that they can afford to produce higher-standard movies that look like a Hollywood movie but simply have a much better story.”

The three Asian films spending time at the Varsity Theatre all have subtitles on the bottom of the screen. Sheets says the idea that subtitles harm a film’s credibility and its box office gross has faded.

“I think another appeal is that there is less of a stigma to movies with subtitles than there used to be,” he says. “I think there is changing attitudes about subtitles and people speaking a foreign language. People are much more open to watching that.”

Audiences want something different to watch when trekking out to the theater for that Friday night movie. Sheets says foreign films are bringing a new draw because American movies are continually repeating the same ideas.

“Hollywood is getting very stale, they do what gets money. And what makes money usually are movies that have a good hero, who has been wronged in some way, a bad guy and an ungood guy, the antagonist that seems to mess everything up,” he says.

“You’ll have this recycling of the same ideas, over and over in every movie and people just get tired of it.”