The guys are a bit tired after a night of holiday shenanigans but that won’t stop them from bringing you all the entertainment and pop culture news. Stories like:
- Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer
- The Dark Half remake
- Mortal Kombat reboot, January 2021
- Keanu Day
- Paramount and Hasbro are rebooting Power Rangers again
- Stargirl certainly is a trailer
- The Griswolds in development @ HBO Max
- Will Poulter drops out of LotR series
- Snow Crash in development
- Dr. Aphra series on Disney+ for 2020?
- Cassian Andor series is a spy thriller
- SHAZAM! 2 confirmed for 2022
- The Flash “confirmed” for 2022
- Marvel Television is dead, long live the MCU
All that, the Weekly Watched, and of course tangents!
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To RDT: I like The Dark Half novel. I’ll never forget the opening chapter about the surgery. And it introduced me to the idea of a parasitic twin, which I find fascinating. I haven’t seen the movie in a long time, but like most 90s Stephen King adaptations it was just okay. It got a new release by Scream Factory on disc a couple of years ago, but I never got around to picking it up.
To the user question: It’s all built on the old content licensing system. Things are either negotiated on a per-title basis or in bulk, and it varies by territory. Sometimes home video rights are negotiated as part of theatrical distribution, sometimes they’re separate. Foreign pre-sales are a whole other thing. It’s an unfortunately complicated system. It’s why region locks still exist for blu-ray/DVD. It’s also why you can have several versions of a movie on home video throughout the world and have every disc look/sound different (distributors don’t always have access to the same master), have different extras, etc. The only thing that is truly universal these days is UHD. Those discs are region free as part of the spec, so you can buy discs from anywhere in the world and watch them on any UHD player.
There was no way Disney+ was going to launch world wide immediately. There’s too much infrastructure that needs to be put in place and stress tested in order to roll out anywhere. The US launch was a huge effort on its own. You have to put up a staggering amount of localized servers to spread the content around the world, so a slower international roll out is necessary in order to make sure everything is in place for the service to work properly. It’s not just a matter of unlocking the content with code. The content versioning for various territories also takes time to put together and encode for distribution. You also have to tweak the interface for the various languages in territories you’re going to launch in. Remember that it took several years for Netflix to get to the point it is now. They were US only for three years before they started expanding. They became “worldwide” in late 2016 (they’re still not in every territory), nine years after they launched. Disney will likely reach Netflix’s rollout faster, but it’s still going to take a few years before its truly worldwide.