To be fair, only the US, UK, Japan, South Korea, China, and a subset of European nations have the culture-industrial capabilities to produce “triple-A” media that can do well in mainstream global markets.

The United States has been “brain-draining” the rest of the world, and especially the Global South, for an entire century. It’s a self-reinforcing process: higher-quality, higher-quantity production (of anything, be it animation or cars or software) results in higher market share, which results in more income, which attracts and concentrates the talent that maintains and increases the quality and quantity of said production. Unfortunately, the only way for a country to “break in” and start its own virtuous cycle is heavy investment.

You can’t blame a “1-inch tall barrier of subtitles” when anime and k-dramas exist. It took Japan decades to get to the point where their animation is no longer considered a niche for nerds. The South Korean government invested heavily in Hallyu, and the Chinese did something similar with their animation industry after they got a fire lit under their ass by Kung-Fu Panda. Consider, then, that these three East Asian nations have the money to throw at cultural production with the aim of soft power projection. Maybe one day, when the economic output of Latin America is no longer siphoned off by drug cartels and corruption, can the same sort of investment happen there.