Following Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire sweeping the Golden Globes on a path that would eventually lead the film to win eight Academy Awards and earn $362 million internationally, film critic David Gritten published an editorial in The Daily Telegraph, proclaiming the worldwide hit, ‘the first film of the Obama era’, for its globalised worldview. As Gritten writes:

Yet, despite the article's evisceration of Merchant Ivory's aesthetic and David Lean's imperial undertones, Gritten resoundingly credits Slumdog Millionaire's success to his own nation, imploring his audience not to forget that the film is, in fact, ‘a British triumph’. For Gritten, the film's status as an adaptation by British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy of Indian author Vikas Swarup's 2005 novel Q&A goes as uninterrogated as his editorial's neocolonial undertones, leading to his positioning of Swarup's source text as merely the rudimentary outline for the film's unprecedented brilliance:

Notwithstanding drastic changes to Swarup's novel during the adaptation process, discussion about the film's relationship to the source text was conspicuously absent from the film's criticism as the press opted to focus on coverage of its child stars’ living conditions and accusations that Boyle's representation of India exploited poverty. While Boyle's representation of Mumbai and the film's production practices certainly deserve critical attention, the near-total dilution of Swarup's imperial and neocolonial critique and the lack of media commentary on the alterations indicate a much keener insight into Western media depictions of postcolonial nations than even the most vocal charges of ‘poverty porn’ aimed at the film.