Why is it with some big American blockbusters Japan gets them dead last compared to every other country? I've noticed that Frozen just came out in Japan while it was released in the US on November 27 last year. The Avengers came out in the US on May 4 2012 and got released almost everywhere else within the month, but Japan didn't get it until August 14. What's up with that?

Japanese fans are pretty annoyed by that. Japan has to wait longer for Hollywood films to get released than virtually anybody else. Some films get released day-and-date with the rest of the world, others can lag behind for as long as a year.

Why? Well, there's simply no great rush on the part of the studios. Unlike the rest of Asia, Japan doesn't have much of a piracy problem. If you wait to release a movie in, say, India, the streets will be flooded with camcorder rips and pirated versions long before the movie opens in theaters. Japanese media consumers don't do that. They wait patiently. They generally don't pirate stuff.

Releasing a movie with a proper marketing push takes a lot of time and money, and Japan has a very crowded film market that sees the release of hundreds of their own movies domestically, in addition to localized releases of Hollywood and other foreign fare. In order to maximize a film's box office potential, releases are carefully timed around holidays and competition at the box office. And of course, this being Japan, I'm sure there are bucketloads of red tape and salaryman hand-wringing involved too.

It's certainly not an ideal situation from the consumer point of view, but the industry has no reason to change, and so it won't.