Most of the answers here seem to me to be way off the mark--strangely given the existance of sites such as box office mojo.
To answer your question straight-up: in the U.S. most movies period, full stop, 'are rejected' AT THE FIRST-RUN THEATER BOX OFFICE. Not most foreign language films, but most movies. All but a small handful get only three-week showing in first-run movie theaters.
There are, to remind you, about 300,000,000 folks residing in the U.S. Do all of that vast number "reject" foreign language films--No. That's just silly. Millions of people in the U.S. consume foreign language film regularly. A "foreign" film that would be considered a 'huge' hit in its native country, will often make more in U.S. secondary markets (Movie TV networks (HBO etc.), DVDs, Streaming, so-called 'arthouse' film theaters, etc.) than it will in its home country.
However, first run theater showings in the US will often cost $12 a ticket (yes, they cost more to see in the theater than to order off Amazon on DVD). Given this cost, and the fact that every one knows they will be able to rent most movies, including foreign language films if they just wait a month or two, the movies that people tend to go see in the theater are what are often called "water-cooler" movies--they are the movies that draw lots and lots of eyeballs such that people feel they are "missing out" on the conversation if they haven't seen it. This is the nature of the "popular culture" beast. If all your friends on facebook are arguing over whether "Sniper" is a good movie, whether it portays heroism, whether it should be celebrated or condemned--you feel you are missing out on the nature of contemporary culture if you haven't seen it also. Thus you pay your $12 bucks, even though it isn't all that rational not to just wait 8 weeks and pay 2 or 3.
Ergo--Sniper = huge numbers of dollars ($100,000,000 first week/$500,000,000 total and those are "first run" box office dollars).
Foreign language films simply have an impossilbly hard up-hill climb to compete with that, especially since there are already a ton of English language movies in first-run theaters (many of which are very good, but just don't "catch on").
Ignorance of this kind of mechanism, in this day and age, when all of this has been well documented, as well as the concomitant anti-US sentiment that the US movie going habits tend to generate, continues to amaze me, frankly.
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