ArgonV wrote:What's up with that?
Part of it is the time it takes to prepare subtitles, dubs, to get the film through foreign ratings boards (and possibly recut based on that), to coordinate foreign marketing, and possibly to work around local movie schedules (like not scheduling "Iron Man 2" to open the same weekend as "Korean Bearded Robot Hero") and holidays (and, now that I think about it, perhaps seasons as well--do "summer blockbuster" movies come out in the Australian winter?).
Then there's foreign distribution negotiations, which is an extremely complicated business. Sometimes movies have that locked down before they even shoot (because they're relying on that money); larger films may wait to prove themselves in domestic markets in order to get better deals overseas.
Finally, there's the physical difficulties in striking new prints (costly) or waiting for the old prints to finish up at home (takes a while) and then shipping them to the foreign markets. In fact, I'm betting part of the reason foreign releases are staggered (it's not, US in May, the world in July, it's US May, UK July, Germany August, etc.) is so that they can reuse prints, at least within language barriers. Print costs are fucking tremendous and most movies can't afford to buy one for every theater in the world at the same time. Digital distribution should alleviate this problem somewhat in the next few decades.
All of these problems
can be overcome--the largest of the blockbusters will sometimes have a simultaneous world-wide release date (which discourages piracy and allows you to take advantage of a single global marketing campaign), but I assume the vast majority of films don't have the money to take care of all of the issues before their release date.
Besides, IIRC, the general rule of thumb is that US box office = worldwide box office, so it's not as if there's a huge incentive for them to care about dealing with every tiny little country.
tl;dr: because
AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!That never gets old - ST
