But what about all of the posters we already printed?

BREAKING NEWS: Get thee behind me, lesser mortals — Transformers: Dark of the Moon jumps to the head of the line on pre-July 4 weekend

LINKS: Transformers: Dark of the Moon official Web site (Incidentally, want to know what your million-dollar movie Web site looks like if viewed from a slightly outdated browser? [Screen grab at the end of this post] If you head to www.transformersmovie.com from something like the new Firefox 4, it looks fine. Suppose, on the other hand, that the browser on your office Mac is two or three generations out of date, only nobody but the network admin is permitted to download upgrades. Now www.transformersmovie.com looks like it's either been hilariously neglected, was recently hacked, or never belonged to Paramount in the first place.)

Michael Bay is cutting in line again. Plainly spooked by his July 1 competition, the chick flicky Tom Hanks vehicle Larry Crowne and the teenage girl Prince and the Pauper knockoff Monte Carlo, the Transformers godfather and his Paramount overlords have bumped up the release of Dark of the Moon to Tues., June 29. That's two whole days, people. The world is officially two days closer to beholding the awesomeness of the third Transformers movie and Larry Whatshisface and the teeny-weeny Selena Gomez thing have been turned into nothing more than pitiable a July 1 AFTERTHOUGHT.

On some level, I get it. There's a Nathan Bedford Forrest mentality about weekends — especially holiday weekends, and especially especially the July 4 holiday weekend — in Hollywood. Get there first with the most men, or don't even bother showing up. What makes less sense is the pseudo-last-minute-ness of it. Hollywood release schedules are known months in advance. Why did it take until T-minus 6 weeks(-ish) before release to suddenly assess the competition and decide, We gotta move this thing up. It's not like the calendar suddenly changed. Wait, wait. July 1 is a Friday? When did that happen? We're supposed to be on the Wednesday before the holiday weekend.

Yeah, OK, it's free publicity. But does Transformers: Get the Heck Outta My Way, Fool! really need that? Maybe there are one or two people out there who will read something about the changed opening date and say, "Dadgum, Myrtle, there's a new Transformers movie coming out!" Surely that level of payoff could scarcely warrant the not inconsiderable amount of rigamarole at stake, beginning with the tsunami of promotional materials that now have the wrong opening date stamped all over them.

I think it's all about ego massage. To a certain class of the Hollywood elite, it sends the following thinly coded message: Our movie is so awesome that we can barely hold ourselves back from unleashing it on the world. In fact, we're just going to CHANGE THE RELEASE DATE by TWO MEASLY DAYS and HANG THE EXPENSE. Ready or not, HERE. WE. COME. These are the kinds of games you can play when the last movie in the franchise before this one took in $836 million worldwide.

 T3 official site on May 20, 6:14 p.m. Click to embiggen.