The concept of the Balkans is one of the most controversial in public and academic discourse, and what makes it so is precisely the impossibility of determining and defining it in the extreme, i.e. of obtaining an agreed definition. This paper does not attempt to answer the question "What are the Balkans?", but elaborates possible answers to the question "Why are the Balkans?" with the help of key prominent historians, social psychologists and media experts. Through the well-known East-West dichotomy, where the East is the Balkans and the West is the USA, the paper tries to assess the level of influence that the North American high-budget film has on the creation and perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudices and general attitudes towards the Balkans globally. Using qualitative methods, such as content analysis, we try to investigate how people from the Balkans, Balkan culture, customs, languages and the Balkans in general are portrayed. The leading hypothesis is that the Balkans are a completely pejorative term for the Eastern European region and that the Hollywood film lives up to this connotation intentionally and/or accidentally through the production of films that in some way thematize the Balkans. The analysis of five selected exemplary films confirmed that negative stereotypes and prejudices about the Balkans are present in many ways within the film, and that in modern Hollywood filmography there are almost no examples of films with the same theme that do not. Thus, it was concluded that American films confirm and encourage negative opinions about the Balkans and the “Balkan peoples”, with the fact that the level of influence on global opinion cannot be measured but only assumed. However, taking into account the power of Americanization and the medium itself such as film, the impact on a global audience is certainly present and significant. The intention of this work is to open a discourse on the global perception of the Balkan region through art and media, because the region is often represented, not only in films, but also in TV series, video games and on social networks. This research can therefore be expanded and upgraded with the analysis of such content, but also with research that studies the role of the Balkans and Balkan film and media in perpetuating negative stereotypes about oneself, because the West and the USA are not solely to blame for this phenomenon.