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Movie Industry Cries All the Way to the Bank
shandrew writes: "Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has reported that the year 2001 was the "greatest box office year in film history" with movie admissions reaching their highest level since 1959. Isn't this the same industry that is complaining that piracy is putting them out of business?"
Lo curioso es que consiguen amortizar la película en menos de 1 año.
Así que a que viene que el derecho de Copyright dure 75 años?
Creo que con 5 años de Copyright tendrían tiempo de vender la película en los CINES e incluso vender unos cuantos DVDs a precio de "estreno".
Pero a más dinero ganan más dinero quieren, y más caso está dispuesto ha hacerles el gobierno.
There's the fundamental weakness of the arguement. When dealing with intellectual property the stealing doesn't cost you (the owner) anything directly. You're only losing the potential profit.
Now the problem is figuring out what that potential profit might have been. Only a small fraction of the people who downloaded your CD for free would have otherwise purchased the music. Against that you have to (or should) weigh the benefit of additional exposure - more people will hear your music and will tend to make it more popular, thus selling more CDs.
I don't think anybody really knows what the impact of all these free downloads is. It is clear that the figures the RIAA throws around are nonsense, since they count each download as a lost sale.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I'll admit I'm guilty of "Movie Trading". It's how I decide what I'm going to buy. For example none of my friends have Neon Genesis Evangelion and I'm sure as hell ain't going to find it at my local blockbuster. Since 25-30 greenbacks is way to much for me to spend on something I'm seeing for the first time, and might not even like.
So I became one with the devil one fateful day and fired up Morpheus. And on that day the worlds biggest evangelion freak was born.
I didn't play with linux for two weeks, cause I didn't want to reboot out of my win2k partion so I could keep downloading. Eventually I had the entire series all mine for free, some were fairly decent quality too.
Did I stick it to the artists who created such an animation masterpiece? Well some would say yes. Some would say they deserve to be ripped off simply for the fact that they charge so much for a three episode dvd. I'm not going to get into that. Plenty of threads covering that topic as it is.
In my case it dosen't really matter anyways. I purchesed all eight dvd's, have an almost complete collection of evangelion toys (Just need to get Unit 01). And a gorgeous Askua poster in a black frame hanging on the wall above my monitor.
Maybe my case is an exception. I never would have bought all this stuff if I never saw the crappy divxes. I relize they're is alot of freeloading on the p2p networks, but because of software like Morpheus and Gnutella I shelled out quite a bit of cash at my local Suncoast. This stuff isn't cheap!
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Funny, I think 2001 is the first year I didn't see at least one movie per week, not even one per month, presumably because 95% of them sucked shit.
It's quite telling when a bunch of chums (some smart, some dumb) look at the 24-plex' listings and all say "there's nothing worth watching". What's even more telling is that the economy is supposedly in a tight spot, yet admission prices have jumped 25% in most cinemas. Are the movies 25% better ? nahhh, they just hurt more when you realize you've just sat through 2 hours of crap that cost you 12$ (canadian). I'd much rather watch 2 hours of Family Man back-to-back for the same price, at least I'd walk out of the dark room with a fresh smile.
Piracy has very little to do with it. I think it plays on the 'value threshold' as I like to call it. Some movies might be worth seeing on a big screen, others you think "hmm nah, i'll wait for the DVD/VHS". Now if one finds a DivX of that second-grade movie, and it's relatively easy and inexpensive to obtain, then why not ? At the same time, this sends a faint monetary message to the movie industry : "we're not going to invest in movies that suck". When thousands of people start doing this, the execs will notice, they might start grasping for more legislative strings to pull, but the message will get across one way or another.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
And thereby lies the problem. Why is a film not shown to all audiences at the same time? Why are some countries more priviledged than others? Why does a DVD come out in region 1 when the same movie hasn't been shown in a theatre in region 3?
And the answer is: Complete. Market. Domination. Have you considered that a DVD in the UK (region 2) costs about twice as much as a DVD in the US (region 1)?
I don't have any more information to hand about screen sizes over time, so I can only say what I think is happening. Perhaps its a UK phenomenon *shrug*
what else? Video games (the majority at least) have remained at about $50 since forever (though gameboy games have climbed). Hardware, just about any type, is always dropping. Magazines (for the content based argument) seem to sell for approximately what they always have. What else out there continues to climb in price year after year?
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Now maybe they can cut some of the cinema prices? I couldnt help but notice that the prices keep ticking up
This is my major beef with box office statistics -- they're reported in $$ instead of the number of butts in seats. That metric would hold across time. Sure, Harry Potter (as an example) made lots of money, but did more people see it than Gone With the Wind?
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
There is a big film industry in Tamil Nadu (southern India). The same shouts and whines are going on here about piracy here.
The movie industry guys get together and decide that no actor should give interview to the satellite TV channels (people prefer to watch their actors in the TV rather coming ot the movie halls !!).
In Radio talk shows, directors call those who watch movies in VCD as doing prostitution at home !!!. The whole thing of not understanding and going along with the technology but resist till they are dragged along kicking screaming is painful
These guys copy so many techniques from Hollywood. But do not look at how the industry there went through the same process and learnt to bring the fans to the movie hall inspite of all the VCDs.
yAthum UrE yAvarum kELir All the places are our place, everybody is our kin. (A Tamil Poet - 2000 years ago)
I'll agree with luck having something to do with it. But please, those guys don't work THAT hard. I've done factory work before, and land scaping, ditch digging, it's not THAT fucking hard. Our country has one of the best student financial aid programs in the world. The idea that someone can't go to their local university, take a loan, and get a degree is ridiculous. Now, in India, over there getting in college is tough, where maybe one in ten thousand get to go. But telling me that someone over here is too poor to go college, when I paid my way through and got two degrees, is absolute bullshit.
That's funny. A big question that has been on my mind recently is "Why do the cinemas think they have the right to show *any* advertising before the movie, basically lying to me, the customer, about the movie's actual start time?" I paid a huge admission price, for 's sake! Not to mention the lofty prices for the refreshments! If that revenue can't keep them going, then maybe they shouldn't be in business to begin with.
Am I the only one who actually feels economically insulted/assaulted by having to sit through these ads?
Check out Commercial Alert for their ongoing campaign against commericials before and during movies and other rampant commercialism.
I'm still haunted by the rampant, conspicuous product placement in Mission to Mars, a crap film otherwise but even crappier with all the ads.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
- But people aren't stealing movies/music as much as the MPAA/RIAA claim to justify the SSSCA.
Indeed. They've never said it was putting them out of business. They claim repeatedly that piracy is costing them billions in lost revenue every year. To date, however, they have offered ZERO proof or statistics to back up their claims. They make sweeping generalizations based on anything from rumor to flawed market studies (polling 10 high school kids isn't very statistically valid) to extrapolations from what they think they should be making.This kind of theft is very hard to quantify. People aren't breaking into a warehouse and taking thousands of CDs. The contents of one (paid for) CD is distributed to hundreds or thousands of people. How much revenue does that divert from sales? Likely far less than it generates. People are much more likely to purchase CDs of the music they have heard and liked. Case in point, I never would've known Gus Gus existed if WB hadn't placed one of their music videos on the jukebox -- Believe. I've bought every CD they've produced. I've bought numerous CDs from 800.com (recently defunct) beacuse they had samples of the songs.
Basically, the MPAA and RIAA are stupid and greedy. Organized piracy (factories producing bootleg CDs and DVDs) costs them a lot of money -- and that's very proven. However, they have taken no actions at all to thwart such piracy. Instead, they harass, berate, and criminalize their actual patrons who are the very foundation of their billion dollar a year industry. They draft one stupid (useless) law ontop of another. They throw one horrible, non-compliant, hack after another at us to "combat piracy" that just makes the disks useless almost everywhere.
And ticket collectors are no biggie. If you have 10x the number of screens, theaters only need to hire up to 2x as many collectors. If there are going to be long lines, so be it. They're going to wait, they already paid for their tickets, so why bother adding more collectors? Same goes for the cashiers (even if they haven't already paid, they've already put the effort to try to find parking amongst the hundreds of parking spots).
The trend I've seen are exactly like the parent post describes: a multitude of screens, with only around two or three of them being big screens with the best surround sound systems for the top movies of the week, with the rest of the screens being smaller room with mediocre (or sometimes horrible) sound systems for the lesser grossing movies of the week. More screens, but not more service. Customers are just cattle. Charge exorbetant amounts of money at the consession stands. Also, don't bother opening up the theater until 5 minutes before the first showing, and don't bother getting the soda or slushie machines working until after the first 50 customers try to order their drinks.
The movie theaters are in a sad, sad state.