One of the release dates of the film is this:

Ucrânia - 28/05/2020 Cinema

See here
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/400160-the-spongebob-movie-sponge-on-the-run/edit?active_nav_item=release_information

In other words, Ukraine in 2020-05-28.
And it is this date that is being considered the World Release Date or Primary Release Date.

Interesting... I thought that by providing the "region" parameter, I would only get movies released in the US on the specified date?

Is there any way to achieve that? (only get movies released in the US on the specified date)

Thanks again

I think so.
If you don't use Primary Release Date.
If you use only Release Date I believe that you will only receive the date of the Region that you specified in the API Request.

@sammydigits said:

Interesting... I thought that by providing the "region" parameter, I would only get movies released in the US on the specified date?

You can't really mix primary and non primary requests. Using primary will negate any region query you're doing because there's no such thing as a "primary release per country". It's a single, per media date. Regular release date queries on the other hand, you're good to go. See below.

Is there any way to achieve that? (only get movies released in the US on the specified date)

Yes, something like this should do:

https://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie?region=US&release_date.gte=2020-05-28&release_date.lte=2020-05-28&include_adult=false&include_video=false&with_release_type=2%7C3&sort_by=popularity.desc&api_key=xxx

Thank you both, switching to "release_date" certainly seemed to solve the issue.

Can you also please confirm the difference between the "limited theatrical release date" vs "theatrical date" as mentioned here in the docs:

"Specifying "2|3" would return the limited theatrical release date as opposed to "3|2" which would return the theatrical date."

Ideally I want a list of movies which are available on general nationwide release in theaters for today's date, so presumably "3|2" would be my best option?

Specifying 2 will always include the limited releases, so if you only want to include wide (nationwide) releases, you should only specify 3. If you specify both, the difference is which release it will show if both exist. 3|2 would default to wide release, while 2|3 would default to limited.

Perfect, nationwide is what I need. Thank you very much for providing this awesome API Travis!