48 Days. That is the difference between the US release date (February 8th) and the current Australian release date (March 28) for The LEGO Move Part 2.
I’d love to pretend to be shocked by this, but I’m not. Village Roadshow co-CEO Graham Burke continues to make a mockery of his own statements on Australian release dates – “Our policy go forward, is that all of our movies will release day and date with the United States”. On September 9th 2014 Mr Burke told the Online Copyright Infringement Forum that holding the LEGO Movie back 54 days was a mistake. It’s a mistake they keep making.
Village Roadshow is one of the most active participants in the battle against piracy here in Australia. Their strategy is simple – get stuff blocked. If sites are blocked then there is no way at all people will able to access pirated content according to their logic. The problem is that blocks are incredibly easy to get around.
People in Australia will pirate The LEGO Movie Part 2. I am willing to put money on that. Then Village Roadshow will come out and say that piracy really hurt the release and that more needs to be done. They might even say that they made a mistake. They won’t mean it. Not really.
The Australian release date is listed as March 28 in the Warner Bros media portal. This is subject to change but Roadshow also told me via Facebook that it will be March or even possibly April.
How very foolish! It’s odd that we Aussies sometimes get Marvel and DC releases a couple of days ahead of the US, yet we keep getting the Lego Movies so very far behind.
Oh well. At least we’ll hopefully get some cool sets out of the movie. I’m hoping for a “2 in 1” build of Emmet and Lucy’s yellow house / spaceship house.
The reason other movies often release early is because Australia’s movie release day is Thursday, while the US has it as Friday. This can allow up to 2 days difference depending on time zones, midnight screenings et cetera. This strategy makes more sense, as these film studios know, than releasing the movies even a single week later to allow the US to be first.
The more time a film is in cinema, the more times it can be seen and the more merchandise will be purchased. This is the fundamental issue here, merchandise is essential to lego movies, but as is the sets will be irrelevant before the movie even releases.
Incidentally, merchandise is not so important for Pixar movies which is why they often have more diverse releases, especially in the UK but also on occasion in Australia. For Pixar, meeting the holidays is more advantageous than not because there is no merchandise to sit around for several months until people buy it.
This is so extraordinarily dumb. Particularly when you consider that the first one was basically made here. When I was at Tafe, we had a guy who taught animation, I was in the programming course so we saw the animation students when we were doing game dev, and he’s the guy who made the Magic Portal film, and he was talking about how he used to work with the people who animated the movie. I can’t believe they’re releasing it late again.
It’s a pirate’s life for me.
Disappointing that they made this mistake again but, oh well. Any potential piracy has been offset against the revenue stream generated, they believe, which is greater in a school holiday period. Makes sense on the surface, as The target market here are back in school in Feb and off for Easter in March.
However the reality is early Feb has very little competition at the movies and schools will have only returned by a few days or a week or so at most, plus still lots of hot weather to drive viewers inside. Comparatively in March/ April there will be a lot of competition, including Avengers 4 for one, movies which have booked these release dates way in advance and have huge a marketing presence. This not only directly impacts competition for families movie dollars, buts also significantly reduces the cinema screen space available for LM2. Add to that all the global marketing and excitement will be aimed at Jan/Feb (and of course we live in a world when isolated marketing no longer exists) which all suggests this move will equate to the same low end box office result as last time, which of course is the reason the above quote was made.
As long as the movie’s fun and the sets a great none of this will matter in the end, but as Michael has highlighted it’s a shame an acknowledged mistake has been repeated.
…..and just to note, because I’m kind of a glass half full guy, since Lego Movie was held back 54 days and Lego Movie 2 looks like its being held back 48 days, we can at that rate of reduction at least look forward to Lego Movie 10 being released on time 🙂
School holidays in WA, NSW, SA, ACT, NT aren’t until 13th April, two weeks after the 28th March, how does that work Village Roadshow.
Vic, Tas and Qld is 6 April to 22 April ok that sort of works but is still off.
They’ll probably move it later
The crappy thing is that the LEGO movie 2 sets will release months ahead of the actual movie and warm shelves across the country as kids (and their parents) will have zero attachment to them. It happened with the Lego Batman Movie.
Someone should go talk to Mr Burke and point out what he said in 2014 and ask “do you still stand by your claim that it was a mistake to hold back the release of The LEGO Movie? If so, why are you doing the same thing again with the sequel? If not, what has changed since then that makes you believe delaying the release of the sequel is good for Village?”
I think it’s actually deliberate to align the release of the movie with school holidays.
And guess what? A high quality copy of Lego Movie 2 is now released on pirated websites, No, not a dodgy filmed-in-the-cinema copy, a proper Netflix-quality version. And it’s available even sooner than expected, as most cinema films take 3-4 months before a proper version is available online. Boy did Village Roadshow really cock this up.
Re-visiting this. There’s an irony that it’s been announced that it will be available to buy next month so I’m going to skip the cinema and do that instead. Will save me a packet with kids! Thanks Village Roadshow and well done. You’ve hurt yourself twice.
Has the Australian DVD/Blu-ray release date been confirmed?