The thing is, this is an Australian movie through and through.
It's written and directed by consummately Australian director Kiah Roache-Turner, who helmed Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead -- a very Australian film which I really liked -- and its sequel.
It stars Australian actors -- Ryan Corr and Robyn Nevin being the ones I recognized beforehand, but also Alyla Browne, who has just been impressing audiences as the younger version of the title character in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. (In fact, just about the only imported actor is American Jermaine Fowler, who plays the unfortunately retrograde "cowardly Black man" in the film.)
It was most certainly shot in Australia, on a Sydney sound stage in fact, but this location is doubling for the U.S. (I thought they mentioned New York, but I don't that referenced in the plot synopsis on Wikipedia.)
And yet, it's still forced to go to the back of the line and end up as one of the standard Australian releases whose release date is time-shifted from the U.S. release. The movie came out in the U.S. on April 12th, which is why I'm already seeing it available for $5.99 -- which, I should say, is a convenient way for me to get ahead of reviewing it in time for its July 11th Australian release.
Now of course, it's very unlikely we would see this if the movie were set in Australia and the Australians were using their natural accents. I can't think of an example where Australia had to wait for an actual Australian movie, not a movie made by Australians but set in the U.S.
Still, I do find it sort of funny that the distributors had no interest in leveraging the Australian cast and crew for a world premiere of the movie in Australia, rather than a world premiere in Los Angeles. If it doesn't mean anything that a movie is made by almost exclusively Australians, why even do it, other than I suppose the tax breaks.
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