Michael Jennings has another of his fascinating blow-by-blow accounts of business in Hollywood lately, this time about this year's "Summer Movie Season". (He explains what that means.)

He makes many interesting points, as he always does in these pieces (which could well end up as a quite successful book, it occurs to me). I've not yet read all of this posting, but have already been especially diverted by the trend Michael notes, towards Hollywood movies being released at the same time all around the world:

One other thing that has been happening this year is what is often called "day and date" international programming. Traditionally, films were released in the US first, and would be rolled out throughout the rest of the world over a period of months. This is now happening less and less for big movies. Films are being released on the same weekend in most major markets. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Hollywood as always is afraid of piracy. Certainly they are losing some money to pirates. Once upon a time I was frequently offered illicit CD and VCDs and VHS tapes when walking down the streets of Asian cities, but if I wanted them in developed countries they would be harder to find. These days I cannot walk down Oxford Street in London without encountering someone selling illicit DVDs of movies current in the US that have probably not been released in the UK yet. Releasing movies in large swathes of Europe and Asia on the same weekend as in the US certainly reduces the window in which this activity is profitable, and this is the main reason given for the fact that there are now simultaneous worldwide releases.

But in reality this is more of a symptom than the cause.

The fact is, the world is rapidly becoming one global media market. …

Michael then digresses to the anachronistically chaotic problems faced by TV signals when trying to gain acceptance for themselves in countries which, technically, they can reach with ease, but which are political defended against them. But that is, as I say, a digression. The big picture story here is globalisation.

… Traditionally movie producers have managed to segment advertising campaigns and everything else into these national markets, but it is working less and less. Publicity campaigns now cross borders at high speed. Teenagers in Australia know by Friday afternoon whether a movie just released in the US is any good. People read reviews from foreign newspapers' websites. If there is a delay between release in the US and release elsewhere, the media buzz may have died by the time the fim gets there. People on British websites such as this one might be writing for largely American audiences, and it is counterproductive if the movies they are talking about are two months old in American terms. All this means that segmented national releases no longer work. And Hollywood is learning to deal with that. (If simultaneous worldwide releases are going to happen, one of the chief problems is expense and logistics. It costs a lot to strike that many prints of celluloid, and getting them around the world is expensive and time consuming. Thus this trend is also an impetus for digital distribution and projection systems to come into being to facilitate this that is not really there for the domestic market. This is particularly so in rapidly developing countries where there are no large networks of existing conventional cinemas already. And indeed we are seeing this, particularly in China, where quite a large network of digital cinemas has been built in the last couple of years).

In any event, this makes writing about the summer movie season much easier for me, since I can now see most of the movies at the same times the Americans do. Of the first five big summer releases this year, four of them have or will be released in the UK within two days of the release in the US. …

I like living in this kind of world, and resented the previous one, where Hollywood stars would turn up on our chat shows and have to wrench their tired minds back to their previous movie but three. And I bet the stars prefer the new world order too. This way, they only have to do their marathons of chit-chatting for the media just the once for each movie.

More importantly, I like the idea of a world in which I have that bit more in common than I used to have with a random guy I meet who lives in China or Turkistan. We already have some things in common of course, most notably major historical events, like 9/11, or, from an earlier time, the assassination of President Kennedy. We have the big sporting events, of course, like the Olympics and the soccer World Cup. The Millenium happened at more or less the same time everywhere, which was also fun. But "history", and also sport, tends to get editorialised locally. I like the idea of an entire movie, with its particular point of view, being shown everywhere, un-"explained" by local middle men.

Of course, so far, these Global Movies have all been made in America. But interestingly (and I can't recall where I've been reading this because I've been reading it in all kinds of places – maybe Michael Jennings has talked about it too) these Global Movies are almost as much of an attack on indigenous US culture as they are on everyone else's culture. All slam bang action, and "universal" themes, with no excessively local references to confuse the Turkistanians.

Nevertheless, for all its dangers of lowest-common-denominator vapidity, I like the idea of a global fuss being made about a movie, even a bad movie, at the same time everywhere. That way I can have a nice little chat with a Turkistanian tourist in London about why, no, I won't be bothering with the latest Tom Cruise either.

Of course "Globalisation" has been gradual, and has been going on for a long, long time, at least since the electric telegraph was first got going in 1842, and this is just another little step in that long, slow, faltering trend, with its numerous local and localist interruptions and counter-reactions (stimulated into existence by the very fact of Globalisation). Nevertheless, as the Jazz Man on the Fast Show says: nice. (What's the Fast Show? Never mind, it's a local thing we have here.)