@Jesse

..or more likely (considering they aren't paying for the beer) they would be drinking the overspills from the spillage trays under the fonts.

*YEEUCH!!*

Mine's the one with a Walther PPK and Aston Martin keys in the pockets.

Unfair

Ok, so it's the other way round to normal, usually americans get movies or tv shows first, and it's everyone else forced to wait...

We live in a globally interconnected world... As soon as the movie gets released in the UK people will watch it and post reviews and/or spoilers about it all over the Internet. So those in the US and other places have a choice...

Isolate themselves from any UK people on the internet...

Not isolate themselves, but not enjoy the movie because they've heard too many spoilers...

Not watch the movie at all because the spoilers said it was lousy.

Download a pirate copy so they can join in the discussions with their foreign friends online.

And in reply to the guy who talked about watching a poor quality cam rip on a 14" monitor....

First, cam rips only come out for *very* early movie releases, at which point your choice is cinema (smelly, uncomfortable seat, other people making noise etc) if your in a supported country, or nothing at all - and you may not get the opportunity of going to the cinema depending where you are.

Second, by the time a movie comes out on physical media it will be ripped in various quality levels, you can download a direct bluray rip at full quality which will look identical to the bought copy... But you have the choice, you can also download a low resolution heavily compressed copy if you only want to watch it on your ipod. Buy the legit bluray and you won't be able to copy it to your ipod easily.

Third, as someone else pointed out, the money you saved by downloading movies instead of buying them means you can now afford to buy better hardware to watch them on - since you can't copy hardware for free.

So above all pirates are better off, more choice, more flexibility... If the movie industry wants to reduce piracy they should stop screwing their customers over with artificially delayed releases, onerous drm schemes that inhibit legitimate things people want to do.

RE: Same day release at cinema and physical media

We have a similar setup in the imax in manchester, one big screen - the rest are all tiny and the sound/picture quality suck. If you want to go see it in the gallary seats in the big screen (leather seats, popcorn/beer service etc) then it's over £20 per person at last check. Not everybody wants to pay £40 to see a film with their partner - I'm not that rich!!

In the end it's not really about seeing it first, it's about quality of viewing being better at home and not having spoilers ruin the film for you. I would happily wait a few months for the region 1 dvd's and import them, infact, at one point I was doing just that. It's impossible now, if it's not ruined by the constant stream of trailers (v1,v2,v3,v4) then it's the reviews, the tv interviews with actors, the trailers on other dvd's out the week before (which end up being different too), then friends and family.