Sorry for the double post, but I may have the beginning of an explanation for that black screen some of us have at the start of a new game.
As I said in my first post, the pre-rendered movies (the ones in the directory of the same name) seem to play fine when I load a game. So yesterday, I made some tests, removing the content of the directory and putting it somewhere else. Same black screen at the start of the game, but also when a previously working movie was supposed to play. I expected the game to show some "missing file" error message or just continue past it, as some other games do, but no, just the dreaded black screen. This means that, unlike what everyone else said, this probably isn't due to the game not able to play the movies because of codecs or something, but that the game apparently can't even find the movie file itself.
Now, why would that be? Just look at the other error some people (me included) had: the "cannot allocate memory" at the game start-up. This was due to the game's installation directory containing Japanese characters, which weren't displayed correctly without having your Windows setting to Japanese. Now, some of the movies' names also contain Japanese characters, including, surprise, the game's opening. That is probably the very first movie the game will attempt to play when starting a new game. Coincidence? ;)