I saw The Dark Knight, the second Batman film by director Christopher Nolan, the other day. Downloaded from the internet of course since I’ve only had bad experiences from going to the cinema (bad audio, image out of focus, annoying audience…).
It was both great and awesome.
However, I don’t feel bad about downloading it. I mean, I understand if some individuals think that I’m a horrible pirate who will ruin the movie industry (actually I don’t, but I’ve come to terms with it). But at least I have some honor and pride! I don’t exploit every opportunity to make myself seem better – and I don’t try to fool people into believing what I say is true.
Warner Bros. apparently don’t have that honor and pride. Of course it’s impossible to say this about a company, but from what I gather this is the entire company’s view of the matter:
Fear that pirated copies would pop up on the Internet during the film’s crucial opening weekend prompted Warner to devote six months to an unprecedented anti-piracy strategy, painstakingly locking down the movie as it moved from production to post-production to movie theaters.
[...]
Warner Bros. executives said the extra vigilance paid off, helping to prevent camcorded copies of the reported $180-million film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours.
Wow. 38 hours? Including the time for the dirty pirates to tape the cinema screen, encode and upload to the internet for free downloading (I’ll leave commercial piracy alone for now), this usually means a week or two of waiting anyway. So 9 days instead of 7? How many people get fed up with waiting because of that small delay? If I don’t want to go to the cinema it’s because I don’t want to go to the cinema.
The article explains that these 38 hours are significant. But I personally believe that generally when a person who wants to see the movie at the cinema will see it at the cinema. Not because they can’t bare to wait for a sucky TeleSync. Unless of course they’ve read bad reviews or heard from others that it sucked. You know, like most movies actually do. Which is why they don’t deserve cinema visitors even.
So, what I’m trying to say is basically that a good movie will make money. A bad movie won’t. So using The Dark Knight as a measurement of “anti-piracy success”, as in the article, is an incredibly foul move. The Dark Knight was successful because it was good. Not because some tacky (audio/image quality) internet distribution copy was “delayed” for 38 hours.
Studios fear a reprise of the “Hulk” piracy debacle. A rough, early version of Ang Lee’s 2003 summer movie made its way to the Internet two weeks before the film’s scheduled premiere, provoking negative reactions from the comic-book film’s devoted fans, whose opinion carries far more weight in determining the success of this film genre than that of mainstream film critics.
So they mean that (basically) if people don’t like the movie – i.e. it’s a bad movie – it won’t make as much money as the producer had hoped for? I doubt that CAM or TeleSync (copying methods where the screen filmed at a theatre) viewers are the only ones who spread the word – IMDB.com is open for anyone.
The current ratings for The Hulk (2003) is 5.8, the current rating for Batman Begins (2005) is 8.4. This also explains why so many came to see The Dark Knight, since its prequel was – put simply – a good film.
