dr_bob dances on the grave of the "the wait" Nothing to do with retro stuff at all today, well very little, just a kind of thought for the day.I'd been thinking about this a while ago and dracos blog kind of reminded me .
Remember back in the eighties and nineties you'd hear about some cool new film your rich cousin (the one with the atari vcs, when you had a crappy pong machine), had seen in the states, and then , about 6 months later you'd eventually start seeing posters for it at the Adelphi or Savoy cinemas..
It used to drive me nuts , I'd wonder "why the hell do we have to wait so long".I remember even in the mid nineties talking to a guy from the states in college on the (proto) web , and him telling me about a film called "ace ventura" that'd been out for months there , I'd never heard of, and didnt see hide nor hair of until another 2 or three months. As a teenager I thought it'd be a brilliant idea for a movie review program where RTE'd send someone (I was available) to the states to review films there , with a recap of the review on the irish release date .Unfortunatly RTE never took me up on this (I was only 13 though).
Anyway the gap has been shrinking and shrinking , so its down to maybe a week or two in nearly all cases..heres my thoughts why, and like most things I blame the internet.
1. DVD sales online ...go to somewhere like play.com , and you can buy Region 1 discs , which do still come out before the UK ones, now what was happening until fairly recently was that you'd be able to buy a R1 disc of a US film that had finished its run and gone to DVD, before It made it to UK screens..I remember seeing "Blade" in a mates house about a fortnight before it started here, and bear in mind this was an official disc, not a back door pirate, which brings me to my next point...
2. p1r8's (or Pirates if you're not a H4X0R)...this is apparantly the reason George Lucas had a same day release with the UK and US for Ep.II...thanks to DIVX compression, broadband,and p2p networks like Kazaa. Movie companies are getting scared, as its childs-play to download and play a movie from the net, yeah it'll be in spectacular "camcorder-vision (tm)" but this hasnt put people off since the days of the dodgy copy of ET with the photocopied cover handed under the counter at "crossroads" video library (yeah everyone new one local video library that had them).And even better for the UK/ireland based film lover , they're up on the net within days of teh US release.Because of this , its a case of , "well I could wait to watch it three months from now in the cinema, or I just could download this dodgy copy and watch it tonight"...
3. Word of mouth .One of the main reasons for the huge delays on films was "damage control" and prepping.(To be fair there may be a little translation needed for the UK market(although ts rare,and possibly a little re-editing , localised posters and ads [although no-one seems to bother anymore] and manafacturing the "reels" themselves takes some time , but this would have accounted for a little part of the wait)Preping , getting one or two actors to do local interviews , whatever , Damage control :Eg If a film bombed in the US , you had time to prepare for your new market, remember before the net people relied on official movie mags and tv shows to find out about films . Not to say the movie companies had that much control over them (they could allow only certain clips or stills to be used), but compare it to today ,where you have a few hundred unoffical uncontrolled reviews available a day or to after the US opening...way to dangerous for the studios..take a movie like "the Avengers" for example...had a tiny release gap...in fact I think it was a same day opening ..I wonder why??:)
Anyway I'm off to see another kind of pirate (p1r8's of the carribean) later in the week...only a 2-3 week gap from the US opening to here ...nice one;)
