This paper examines English subtitling of Hero as an attempt to study various textual and extratextual constraints on film subtitling from Chinese into English. We are inspired by Venuti in his discussion of domestication and foreignization to look beyond the text at a macro level for possible economic, political and cultural factors that determine a certain strategy to be adopted in translation in addition to various medium-specific constraints.This paper comprises both close textual analysis and extratextual discussion. We recapitulate the ongoing debate around two translation strategies: domestication and foreignization. Then we scrutinize the general and medium-specific constraints upon film subtitling. Hero is used for a case study. We analyse with examples how its English subtitling deals with the various constraints. We establish that Hero’s English subtitling tends to domesticate the original in four major manifestations. We examine the extratexutual factors that lead to the overall strategy of domestication in Hero and discuss the implications of such a strategy.This paper is an attempt to address the situation where little research is done from a cultural approach in film subtitling from Chinese into English. It is our hope that more researchers will devote their efforts to this area for deeper insights.