Hey, have you seen Captain America: Civil War yet? You have?
Uh-huh. Oh, sure, that one scene does sound awesome, and I bet you Tom Holland probably really is a great Spider-Man. What’s that? You say it’s the best Marvel movie of all time if not the best comic movie ever? Well, gosh, that’s swell, but, um, shut up for a second because Civil War only came out in around half the world this weekend. The rest of us have to rest until next weekend.
But that’s a tune I’ve sung before. Almost a year ago exactly, after the early foreign release of Avengers: Age of Ultron I took a deep dive into why exactly it is that so many Hollywood movies come out overseas before debuting in the United States and Canada. You can read what I found in more detail here, but the short version is that in the age of social media early foreign releases help feed into the word-of-mouth back home. Plus, it is thought to combat piracy, and caters to the ever-increasingly important international market.
It didn’t used to be like this. Hollywood movies used to take months if not a full year to gradually reach the rest of the word. While that can still happen in isolated incidents and specific to countries with remarkably restrictive policies on importing movies (e.g., China, Japan) it’s simply not as common anymore. Instead, over the past month both The Huntsman: Winter’s War and Jungle Book tested the international box office waters first before hitting the United States, and with Civil War officially kicking off the summer movie season it’s going to keep happening.
Just so we can all be on the same page about this, I put together the following list breaking down which of summer 2016’s movies will be rolling out overseas first. The release dates are all from IMDB and are current as of this writing. I broke it down into two major categories: “At least 1 week earlier” and “Just a couple of days earlier.”
What did I discover? Beyond Civil War, the only films with significant early overseas roll outs are The Angry Birds Movie, X-Men: Apocalypse, Neighbors 2, Ice Age: Collision Course and Warcraft. Otherwise, there will just be a lot of movies opening overseas a couple of days earlier instead of a full week or more.
At Least 1 Week Earlier
Captain America: Civil War
Start of International Roll-Out: 4/27
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 54
The Angry Birds Movie
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/11
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 56
Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/4
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 27
X-Men: Apocalypse
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/18
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 53
Warcraft
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/25
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 36
The Secret Life of Pets
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/24
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 7
Ice Age: Collision Course
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/30
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 27
Star Trek Beyond
Start of International Roll-Out: 7/8
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: Bulgaria (7/8) + 28 others from 7/19-7/21
Florence Foster Jenkins
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/5
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 9
Sausage Party
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/10
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: Poland, Romania and Ukraine on 6/10 and then nothing until it hits 9 more countries on 8/11
Ben-Hur
Start of International Roll-Out: 8/10
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 6 the weekend before, 6 the day before
Just a Couple Days Earlier
The Nice Guys
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/18
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 5
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/25
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 26
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
Start of International Roll-Out: 5/30
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 36
The Conjuring 2
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/8
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 18
Central Intelligence
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/15
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 6
Independence Day: Resurgence
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/22
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 21
The Purge: Election Year
Start of International Roll-Out: 6/29
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 8
Suicide Squad
Start of International Roll-Out: 8/3
# of Countries It’ll Play in Before U.S.: 25
These movies are coming out overseas a single day earlier:
- Money Monster
- Me Before You
- Now You See Me 2
- Finding Dory
- The BFG
- The Legend of Tarzan
- Ghostbusters
- Jason Bourne
- Pete’s Dragon
- Kubo and the Two Strings
And these movies will either come out in the U.S. first or have a simultaneous global release:
- Popstar: Never Stop Popping
- Free State of Jones
- Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
- The Infiltrator
- Lights Out
- Bad Moms
- The Founder
- Nine Lives
- The Space Between Us
- War Dogs
- Don’t Breathe
- Hands of Stone
- Mechanic: Resurrection
I live in Australia aka Narnia where we are cut off from the rest of the world, and everything isnt “Available in your region” so I LOVE this new trend of having movies released here first. 😀
It’s always risky to use a sport analogy, but I think of this in terms of the NBA. For the longest time, the Los Angeles Clippers were terrible and the Los Angeles Lakers were one of the best teams in the league. Now, over the past couple of years the Clippers have turned into an amazing team with some of the league’s best players while the Lakers are a laughingstock, in fact one of the worst teams. If you’re a Lakers fan can you really look over at the Clippers and feel entitled to any sense of outrage? Of course, many of them probably do, but, come on, you had it so good for so long. It’s only fair, in a karmic sense, that the Clippers enjoy success now.
Of course, that analogy would seem to suggest that I think the US is or at least was better than everyone else, a mindset which would render me so stereotypically American. That’s not what I am saying. I’m saying that noticing how many movies open overseas first is actually a reminder of just how good the U.S. had it for so long. When I was a kid, most major movies still opened in the U.S. first. Now, the domestic market has been eclipsed by the international one, and as of the most recent estimate China will have overtaken the U.S. has the leading individual market for film as soon as next year. So, some stuff is going to inevitably change, and I can’t rightfully be annoyed by it. I can simply joke about it and then remember, “So, this is what the rest of the world felt like for all of those years, huh.”
The funny thing, though, is that I don’t know aware people actually are of this trend. This post was actually inspired by a conversation with a fellow blogger I had, and he just assumed I was about to see Civil War because it was already out in his country and he’d seen it. So I wanted to, at least from a U.S. perspective, get everyone on the same page about this.