Current example: Rick and Morty. With that, I noticed how that doesn´t make sense to me. I get why a show might have to be translated and dubbed first in the case of countries with other languages, but why does the UK have a later release date for US-produced shows and movies than the US? It doesn´t even build up hype or anything, if anything it just encourages piracy. Once Rick and Morty is available in my country, I will probably have seen it already. So why do producers not try to go for a global release?
In: Culture
What’s easier to make money? Do whole lot of legwork of legal, translation, marketing, promotion, etc etc. Or sell the rights to the movie for 500million and let the locals in that area do it?
A big part is usually localization.
Dubbing/subbing and recutting the movie for the local market. Obviously with Hollywood moves in UK there only needs to be a minimal amount of that.
Scheduling is another big reason. You have to release your movies so they are in theaters at the right time. There are only so many screens to be had and big studios may require that a movie is shown on a large number of screens so you need to pick a time where your movie won’t compete with a big blockbuster for screens or when it won’t have to compete with a more popular movie for audiences.
Historically you also had the issue that there were only so many prints of a movie to go around and that instead of printing more you can reuse them elsewhere. With digital distribution this is obviously no longer an issue.
Historically because companies used to sell rights to local distributors who handled things like promotion, translation and miscellaneous stuff like legal/ratings stuff – there used to be a lot of lag time in those processes.
Now, those things have been compressed from the “work” end of it and with global awareness, but bureaucracies still exist around ratings and stuff.
Also, high piracy jurisdictions are usually lagged to prevent them from leaking before the bigger profit markets.
It’s dumb as fuck because literally everyone I know has already pirated it before it airs tomorrow night – devaluing what they could have got for it. I would happily pay for it on prime but even that is not an option.
Rick and Morty is an American show, on an American TV channel, made by an American company. If they want to air the show in other countries, there are a number of arrangements that need to be made. They need to find a foreign distributor, a foreign channel to air it on, they need to deal with a foreign government and its set of rules, etc. Maybe the foreign channel Rick and Morty airs on has its own content it wants to prioritize, or maybe it turns out the foreign government has a slower content rating system than the US. There are a million different reasons it might come out at a different time, simply because there isn’t one monolithic system for releasing media worldwide simultaneously.
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