When I was wrapping up my ski holiday, I remembered that two of my writers were supposed to attend an advanced screening of the seventh Mission: Impossible movie on Monday night and write me a review. I try to remind them they've agreed to these things, since they're younger than I am and in my experience, millennials don't have the same notion of remembering things and remaining committed to things that we sturdy Gen Xers have. I reminded them about a week beforehand but forgot to remind them a day beforehand, so I thought the next best thing was to check in with them after the fact. I didn't figure they could turn back time, but at least I'd know sooner rather than later whether I was expecting a review from them.
Well, I shouldn't besmirch their names because my fears were unfounded. They did indeed go. They didn't need some person who is (almost) old enough to be their father to provide them a paternalistic reminder.
They wouldn't, however, be ready with a review before the week was out, which I expected. They lead busy lives, or at least they perceive them to be busy, which amounts to the same thing.
This didn't matter, though, because I knew the movie was not coming out until next Thursday, and indeed reviews were actually embargoed up until today.
That's when one of the guys told me they'd said at the premiere that the movie was opening on Saturday.
If we had been in the same room they would have heard me scoff. Instead I wrote in our Facebook chat, hoping the scoffing tone was only in my head and not my words, "I don't think it would come out on a Saturday but I also don't think the release date is until next Thursday."
I mean, of course a movie would not come out on a Saturday. When have you ever heard of a movie coming out on a Saturday? Unless of course that Saturday falls on Christmas.
The response came "Yeah I agree but that's what they said at the premiere and that's what flicks.com.au is reporting."
Lo and behold, it was true.
I didn't go to that website, but I did go to Hoyts. No shows Thursday, no shows Friday, but then lo and behold, shows Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and I pretty much stopped at that point.
What?
Just to establish our default terms here, movies release on Thursdays in Australia. Full stop. The only exception I can think of is Boxing Day, which is, for some odd reason, the biggest release date on the whole calendar. If Boxing Day is a Sunday, then one time a year movies come out on a Sunday.
They don't even especially seem to come out early, like you sometimes see in America when a movie jumps the standard Friday release date and comes out on a Wednesday or Thursday. See, Australian Thursday is already early. It's how I got to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny before anyone else, as well as every one of the new Star Wars movies. And since Australian Thursday night is actually only Thursday morning in the U.S., I might be seeing these movies 36 to 48 hours before my American counterparts. Not only is the release day a day earlier, but the day of the week arrives a day earlier because of the time zones.
A Saturday? A Saturday is unheard of. It's two days late for the Thursday release date and five days early for the next Thursday.
The first thing I could think of was that Tom Cruise had mandated that this movie must screen in the United States of America before it screens anywhere else. That was the only thing I could think of to explain the odd release day. By our Saturday, the U.S. Friday would have passed and now the movie would be safe for pirates the world over.
But as far as I can tell, the movie doesn't actually release in the U.S. until next Wednesday, the 12th. So yes, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is going early for the Friday release date in the U.S., opening on a Wednesday, but it'll be four days later than Australia.
And Hong Kong, it would seem. On IMDB, Australia and Hong Kong are the two countries that have a July 8th release date. Perhaps even stranger, though since it's not in a Christian part of the world it may not matter, the movie opens on Sunday the 9th in the United Arab Emirates.
But if Tom Cruise's paranoia over piracy is not a factor in any of this, what explains it?
Dunno. The internet won't tell me.
Either I'm not googling the right search words or no one thinks it's nearly as interesting as I do.
There is one more release date for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One that we have to discuss, and that's the actual release date on this poster: July 14th. That's the Friday and that would be when you'd see this movie if all else were equal and nobody were jumping any guns to try to boost the hype. And this is the release date for countries ranging from Bangladesh to Ireland to Taiwan.
Did I say one more? Thursday the 13th -- the day that it says it's releasing in Australia from a May 25th blurb that google picks up -- has countries like Argentina, Hungary and the Netherlands.
A wide array of slightly disparate release dates is nothing new, and I only mention it because it's something we're already discussing.
The weird thing -- in this particular case, and at least from an Australian movie industry perspective -- is definitely the Saturday. You're missing anyone who might want to go to the movies on Friday night, hamstringing the opening weekend box office by excising one of the two biggest time windows for making money on that weekend.
But maybe this is just a sign of how much things have changed within the industry, and how big of a hit they know this movie is going to be. If this movie does anything like the box office for Top Gun: Maverick, they could limit the movie to weekdays before noon and it would probably still make a billion worldwide.
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