Soon after the Iranian revolution of 1979, both the US and Iran governments banned the distribution and exhibition of American films in Iran. The film industries in the two countries, however, used the political tensions as the subject matter of several of their products. This paper focuses on the reception of those American films in Iran which directly touched upon the causes and effects of the mutual animosity between the two states. I argue that the Iranian reception of these films developed a discursive narrative of Hollywood as a unified entity directly influenced by Islamophobia and anti-Iranianism. On a broad level, this research investigates how the meanings of cultural products are constructed and construed against the backdrop of local and transnational sociopolitical contexts. Tracing the official, underground, and diasporic responses of Iranian politicians, film critics, and intelligentsia in a variety of Persian and English news items and critical pieces, I analyze a track initiated by Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter (1990) and peaked by Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012). These cinematic adaptations of literary works share considerable similarities in their claims of authenticity and narrative patterns. Not Without My Daughter is about an American mother who wants to save her daughter from a barbaric society and an untrustworthy father by plotting an escape from Iran back to the USA. Argo is about a former CIA agent who wants to rescue six Americans trapped in Tehran during the Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981. These films contributed to the configuration and evolution of Iranians’ perception of Hollywood in the past three decades. A shared fear of Not without My Daughter’s negative effects on international public opinions about Iranians formed an alliance between many writers and critics of opposing political convictions. The Iranian officials exploited this wounded sense of national identity to advance a radicalized notion of the theory of cultural imperialism. Introducing Hollywood as the enemy’s arsenal in a media soft war, their theory of cultural assault prompted legal and cultural responses to similar American films in the following years. However, Iran’s own culture wars, revised structure of access to foreign films, and the success of Iranian filmmakers in international festivals made considerable changes to this hegemonic reading of Hollywood among various groups. Consequently, the Iranians’ responses to Argo were openly varied and negotiated. The historical approach of this research, thus, reveals much about the origination, contestation, and negotiation of Iranian cultural policies.