Good piece in today's NYT about the trend towards big Hollywood blockbusters opening simultaneously all over the world rather than dribbling into separate national and regional markets over a period of months. This stops piracy, and cuts marketing costs. A staggered release starting in the USA stirs up interest elsewhere which is then met by the pirates if locals can't immediately see the thing in their local cinemas. A worldwide media blitz and a worldwide opening makes more sense.

And in the days of the Internet, serious media blitzes are almost impossible to prevent becoming worldwide.

Also, if Hollywood knows that the word-of-mouth – and the word-of-Internet – is likely to be bad, as was the case with Matrices 2 and 3, a worldwide release gets bums on seats everywhere in large numbers before the w-o-m and w-o-I kicks in.

Result? The latest Lord of the Rings movie took in a quarter of a billion dollars in its first five days.

The global village is getting ever more global.

It makes sense to me. We all saw Saddam captured at the same time, apart from Alice. People everywhere can all read the latest on Brian's Culture Blog as soon as I've done it. Why not LOR3?

(By the way, the w-o-m for LOR3 seems to be good. Jonathan Ross likes it, anyway. Personally I shall wait until it is out on DVD and then not see it on DVD either.)