Europe is problematic because different countries have different distribution companies because the audiences expect things in different languages - posters, marketing materials, subtitles, voiceover tracks. All of these are paid for by the national distributor. It's very hard for outside distributors to break into a national market because they don't have the leverage with the theater chains and TV broadcasters, or the translators and actors in the case of producing soundtracks in other languages.
Studios don't really have the leverage to do much about this because they are dependent on national distributors to collect the revenue and often to put up the money for the production cost ahead of time(eg distributors will put up a few million Euro in advance to buy the rights to a film with a popular star and a good story based on a trailer shown at a prestigious film festival. This is why the Cannes film Festival is a big deal; not so much because of all the stars, but because that's the event where EU film distributors look into what studios want to produce for the following year and sign contracts to buy the rights).
It sounds to me that you want a single global marketplace that all films are sold into and that delivers direct-to-consumer from there, but there isn't any single media company in the world big enough to do that - and if there were, it would be run into problems with authorities in the US and EU for restraint of trade, price-fixing etc.. You would basically be removing the rights of producers to negotiate their own prices and have a sort of industry communism, which would give the few biggest studios more power than they have now.
I'm European, non-native English speaking, yet I'm not waiting for a single one of "different languages, posters, marketing materials, subtitles, voiceover tracks"
So they can already release it before all that. Then do that stuff afterwards to get more viewers.
Well, part of what the national distributors are paying for is the exclusive right to distribute the film within their territory. Cash up front front from an established distributor looks a lot nicer in the business plan than possible future download revenue combined with having to do your own advertising in each language market. If you can't pre-sell the exhibition/video/broadcast rights, then essentially you have to borrow at a high rate of interest to compensate people for the significant downside risks.
The fact that producer, consumer and distributor interests are not aligned doesn't mean they're oppositional. Consumers aren't incentivized or sufficiently experienced or organized to provide forward financing in most cases, distributors aren't incenitvized to give away free copies because they're trying to recoup their risky investment.
Studios don't really have the leverage to do much about this because they are dependent on national distributors to collect the revenue and often to put up the money for the production cost ahead of time(eg distributors will put up a few million Euro in advance to buy the rights to a film with a popular star and a good story based on a trailer shown at a prestigious film festival. This is why the Cannes film Festival is a big deal; not so much because of all the stars, but because that's the event where EU film distributors look into what studios want to produce for the following year and sign contracts to buy the rights).
It sounds to me that you want a single global marketplace that all films are sold into and that delivers direct-to-consumer from there, but there isn't any single media company in the world big enough to do that - and if there were, it would be run into problems with authorities in the US and EU for restraint of trade, price-fixing etc.. You would basically be removing the rights of producers to negotiate their own prices and have a sort of industry communism, which would give the few biggest studios more power than they have now.