There’s two aspects to regions on TMDB that should be explained. The first is the new region parameter.

The region paramater will act as a filter to search for and display matching release date information. This parameter is expected to be an ISO 3166-1 code.

For example, if you were searching for the movie Whiplash and wanted to show the German release date (to go with the German translation) you can make a query like so:

Example German Request
curl --request GET \
     --url 'https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?query=Whiplash&language=de-DE&region=DE' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer {ACCESS_TOKEN}' \
     --header 'accept: application/json'

In this case, region is simply acting as a presentation filter.

In the event that we don’t have a release date entered for the country you are searching for, we simply default back to the primary release date like always. This is the same as no value for region parameter.

Where this can get pretty amazing is with the with_release_type filter that can work in with the region.

E.g you were looking for movies that are in the theatres in Germany this week. You can use this query:

Example German Theatrical Request
curl --request GET \
     --url 'https://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie?language=de-DE&region=DE&release_date.gte=2016-11-16&release_date.lte=2016-12-02&with_release_type=2|3' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer {ACCESS_TOKEN}' \
     --header 'accept: application/json'

You can specify any release type as found in our documentation. If you do not specify with_release_type while using the region param on discover, region simply acts as a filter looking for any movies that match your filter criteria that have atleast a minimum, of one matching release date for the country specified.

Release Types

TypeRelease
1Premiere
2Theatrical (limited)
3Theatrical
4Digital
5Physical
6TV