Yes, initially the 'big three' Odeon, Cineworld and Vue had boycotted it. Cineworld saw the commercial oppotunity in taking 100% of the market share for what was expected to be a huge release, so they came to a deal with Disney fairly quickly. After that, Vue followed suit, followed a couple of days later by Odeon. Not sure what the final outcome was, but I think it was a compromise of less that the standard 16 weeks but more than the 6-ish weeks that Disney had wanted.
You don't have anything to do with EA do you? If so I might have to put you on ignore just on principle.
I remember the days of VHS where it took almost a year from theatrical release to home video sell-through. The early days of DVD was better, I remember getting tons of R1 DVDs before they were even released at the cinema here! However, what with worldwide releases often being only a few days or weeks of each other, that particular joy has diminished somewhat... Sigh...
