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The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent a Box Office Record

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-wouldn't-download-an-angry-green-dude dept.

TheGift73 sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie's profits, it's really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage. ... Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the U.S. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher. Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these 'pirates' do not all count as a lost sale."

2 of 663 comments (clear)

  1. Harm is Harm, and Piracy is Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You just showed that in the best case scenario, Avengers is out over $1,000,000. I'm sorry that that is chump change to you guys, but when you've invested 250,000,000 in a product, and actually a multiple of that after marketing, distribution, gross points, overhead, financing, etc, every penny counts. Just because an opening sets a record, does not mean it is the appropriate opening for the movie — the movie is pretty good, perhaps the record opening should have been even higher. This also neglects the simple fact that as ticket prices rise with inflation, openings will ever progress higher, regardless of attendance and that during difficult economic times, cheap entertainment like the Avengers should experience record popularity to begin with. Its frankly not relevant how much money the movie made, if it should've made more, then it should've made more.

    Additionally, counting only BitTorrent sites ignores the numerous streaming sites it has been available on for over a week, as well as many other forms of piracy. I would wager that the true cost of piracy to that movie so far has been 10-20mm, potentially even an order of magnitude more, but even if it were not, to post such an obvious straw man as though it has any relevance or logical validity as a claim is ridiculous. Just because something is difficult to measure, does not mean it is not definitively damaging.

    Finally, while not all pirated views represent a lost full-price admission ticket sale, they most certainly do represent a non-zero form of lost revenue. I do not believe that a person willing to BitTorrent a CAM, or stream the movie, would be unwilling to sit through a few commercials, pay a few dollars on-demand, or watch it on Netflix or traditional television once it was available in those formats. By watching it through an unlicensed, and unmonetized channel, they are reducing the lifetime revenue generating views of the film by 1; what the exact amount of that revenue is, is irrelevant — harm is done.

    We all love sharing, right? And we all hate leechers? — well guess what. Pirates, are the leechers — they are those who accept the gifts of content creators to society, without giving back anything in return. Piracy is fundamentally wrong; it is antisocial, it is illegal, and it is fundamentally damaging to the core beliefs and values of our society. We have a civic responsibility to respect the works of our fellow men and compensate them fairly for our use of them, not ransack their store because they are too feeble to defend their wares.

    I am disgusted by the pro-piracy bent on this message board, and would ask those to consider what happens to a resource scarce society, when we stop having respect for the works of others.

  2. Re:Facts! Don't talk to me about facts! by kiwimate · · Score: 0, Troll

    For f***'s sake, as you said, we've had a thread of this exact nature pop up every 2 months for the last 10 years, so how the hell can you not know that.

    Nice rant...

    Stop injecting emotion into your arguments.

    Heh. The parent was rational, calm, and logical. You're raving like a lunatic. Who's getting emotional here?

    Putting aside the endless debate about theft/stealing/copyright infringement (and no matter what you call it, it's illegal), would you care to address the main theme that states the movie industry has the right to choose their business model and then succeed or fail by that choice, rather than have it ripped away from them?

    But what they DON'T want is people turning to the internet for independent content that they don't have their greedy, propagandizing hands on. It's a thinly veiled excuse to make sure no one else can encroach on their territory.

    Ahem, what were you saying about injecting emotion into the argument?

    This is silly. They don't want people turning to the internet for THEIR content in violation of their chosen business model. As stated, that's their right. Don't like it? Don't buy their stuff. Write a letter telling them you don't like it. (But do try and edit a bit better; you come off as a pissed 12 year old in this post.)

    There are plenty of independent movie producers, people uploading documentaries for free on YouTube, etc. Who's stopping them? I see the argument time and time again on Slashdot that there's no value in Facebook because "anyone can put up their own website". Clearly this is not quite as simple an argument as one might suppose, or Facebook wouldn't have 900 million active monthly users. But using this same argument, why can't an independent film producer upload their works to a web site and let people download it from there? Cameras are free, production is free, actors are free, web sites are free, and bandwidth is free.

    Well, it must be, mustn't it, or you wouldn't keep insisting that taking stuff for free doesn't matter...