While American movies have enjoyed decades of success around the world, there's something about Hollywood that certain countries just don't like. To be more specific, there is something about Hollywood that China does not like. The Chinese Communist Party has a frankly shameful record when it comes to outlawing perfectly innocuous and even delightfully charming classics. Just look at the weather China banned 'Back to the Future' for a wild reason that time travel movies in general "disrespect history". It also took until 2006's Casino Royale for James Bond to be unbanned in China, which is pretty crazy considering the character rose to legendary pop culture status not long after. 1962's Dr. No began cinema's most enduring run.

Banning art of any kind is a pretty nasty thing to do if you ask me, but China isn't the only offender on that front. If you want to talk about treating the population as if they were the property of the state, the CCP is outranked in the East only by the "society" overseen by Kim Jong Un in North Korea. The last incarnation of the "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un inherited a state with a long and proud tradition of banning creative products for the kinds of nebulous reasons that arise from these totalitarian regimes - "Insult to the National Spirit", what a thing.

Take your time Seth Rogen almost managed to start a war with North Korea for his 2014 comedy The Interview. At that time, according to The BBCKim and his colleagues called the release of the film, "the most blatant act of terrorism and war" and condemned the "reckless provocative madness of the United States" for enabling a "gangster director", apparently causing a "surge of hatred and fury" in the homeland. In that case, one can see how a movie that poked fun at Kim Jong Un himself could turn the dictator. But it wasn't the first time North Korea banned a film for offending the country's sensibilities. In fact, they outright banned a film that depicted the destruction of large swathes of the United States in intimate detail, proving that there really is no pleasurable pleasure for these despotic people.

A big success when it first debuted in 2009, "2012" did 757 million dollars by supplying moviegoers with spectacular apocalyptic action. Roland Emmerich's film saw the world subjected to every natural disaster imaginable as the end times arrive and John Cusack tries to get his family out of a crumbling Los Angeles to safety. That particular sequence remains one of the film's most memorable, with the City of Angels falling into the abyss as Cusack and co. they fly through the carnage in a Cessna.

You might think that a movie depicting the utter destruction of Los Angeles — surely the perfect symbol of American excess — would play well with the North Koreans. After all, even those of us who live in Los Angeles have, at least once in our lives, hoped the ground would descend after trying to merge from the 5 to 134 during rush hour. If you happen to live in a country where hatred of Western ideals is baked into its guiding principles, then you'll probably jump at the chance to see the destruction of LA in all its cinematic glory.

Unfortunately, the citizens of one of the world's most repressive countries were denied the opportunity to enjoy the fall of the United States when Kim Jong-un's predecessor, Kim Jong-il, banned "2012" — the disaster movie to end all disaster movies — from the country. What upset the so-called "dear leader"? Well, it turns out that 2012 was a pretty big year for the North Koreans. Let me explain.

North Korea is what Christopher Hitchens called a "necrocracy." That is, a country where the head of state is a dead man. Kim Il-sung remains the nation's leader even though he died in 1994, which should go some way to conveying the control his disastrous dynasty has over the country. As such, you can imagine that his sons wanted to celebrate the centenary of their father's birth on April 15, 2012. According to TelegraphKim Jong-il has designated 2012 as the year North Korea will "open the great gates to become a rising superpower."

So when Hollywood made a movie that saw the entire world destroyed that very year, Kim Jong-il wasn't exactly happy about it. In fact, he went further than just banning the film from showing in cinemas. How TIME any North Korean citizen found with a plain copy of "2012" is allegedly charged with "grave provocation against the development of the state" and could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

If it made North Koreans feel better, "2012" only managed a 40% rating Rotten tomatoesso Kim Jong-il could at least claim to have done Roland Emmerich a favor by preventing more critics from seeing the film - that is if his country was allowed an independent press.