Anime News Network has an article explaining why the Gundam franchise isn't popular in America unlike native Japan.
This is something I have known for a very long time. Unless the robot being featured is Optimus Prime, mainstream Americans simply have no interest in the mecha genre of anime, period. Even in Netflix's Voltron: Legendary Defender, of which there is a huge positive response to it, the title robot only appears in less than half of the season's episodes, with the rest focused mainly on its characters. It's not essentially a bad thing, but in mecha anime, the featured robot is always the very center of it all, be it from Evangelion, the Gundam franchise, Astro Boy, and Gurren Lagann.
Pacific Rim is another example of American audiences very disinterested in giant robots.
The Iron Giant is the closest thing to a fictional work about mecha that really connected with American audiences, and that the Giant itself is a major character. But that's such a stretch.
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