RANT: End Staggered International Release Dates!

And now, a break from your regularly scheduled feminist analysis of pop culture, as this Bitch Flicks writer has HAD ENOUGH with writing about pop culture that is so six-to-ten-weeks ago.

When I first joined the Bitch Flicks team, I warned my editors that living in South Africa, I might not be able to cover new releases in a timely fashion. I wrote about this in my first regular post for the site, trying to figure out the vagaries of the international release schedule. 

Drawing near the end of my second summer movie season in Cape Town (where it is winter, mind you), I have to admit that my guesses at a pattern were way off the mark. In fact, THERE IS NO MARK. Movies are released in South Africa whenever the studios damn well feel like it. Sometimes months after the American release on home video (I did a double take when I saw a Killing Them Softly poster at the theater last week. I’m not sure Brad Pitt remembers that movie having existed!). This has only gotten worse because two of the indie theaters near me have closed in the past year. None of the “Now Playing” films about women in our sidebar to the right are open in South African theaters.

It’s gotten to the point where one of the reasons I’m excited to be taking a trip home at the end of the month is that the in-flight entertainment will invariably include films not yet released in South Africa. 

And yes, this is a first world problem (see also: unavailability of Diet Coke) that I am fixating on for selfish reasons. But this also irritates my sense of reason. I suppose back in the way back, studios staggered international releases to save on the cost of making physical prints of the film: once the major markets were done with theirs, they could ship them off to the rest of the world. But it’s 2013. Whatever part of me wants to be a purist about traditional film projection is throwing up its hands in surrender. I will happily watch a digital projection of a movie if I can watch it at least in the same month as my colleagues at Bitch Flicks, not to mention my Twitter feed. It’s definitely better than waiting for it as in-flight entertainment. 

And it’s a no-brainer that staggered international releases encourage piracy. While I dip my toes in the piracy gray area of using VPN to access online content restricted in my country (my husband would probably quit his job if it were keeping him from watching the last episodes of Breaking Bad), I don’t want to outright steal movies because the studios won’t let me pay to see them. But I know not everyone is as ethical as me, and I’m not even going to judge them for it. I am going to judge the studios for leaving the door wide open for piracy while railing about how it is going to destroy the industry.

I open the floor to the wise minds of our readers: does anyone have better explanations for why international release dates are still so delayed? Do any other international Bitch Flickers have suggestions for how to survive as a movie lover completely detached from the online hype cycle?   

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Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa who longs to guzzle a Diet Coke at a Friday-at-Midnight screening of a big blockbuster release. She is now shedding a tear shaped like an eagle while humming “America the Beautiful.”