Once Again, Piracy Is Destroying The Movie Industry... To Ever More Records At The Box Office
from the because-of-course dept
We seem to end up posting stories like this every year, but it just keeps on happening. Hollywood whines and whines and whines about how piracy is killing the movie business... and then announces yet another record year at the box office.Of course, sometimes people argue back that this is only because tickets are more expensive and that fewer people are actually buying tickets to go to the theater. About that...Recent numbers show that the movie industry just broke the magic $11 billion barrier, generating more revenue than ever before at the North American box office. The revenue for 2015 totals $11.3 billion, which is roughly a 9% change compared to last year.
The worldwide grosses also reached an all-time record according to research from Rentrak, which estimates the global grosses at a staggering $38 billion based on data from 25,000 theaters across the globe.
Another sign that business is going well, at least for some, is the increase in the number of tickets that were sold. In 2015 theaters increased their ticket sales by more than 5% in North America.I imagine that some will respond that this was really only because of the desire to see the new Star Wars flick, but isn't that simply proof that if you deliver what the public wants, they'll pay to go to the theater?
The other response, then, is that the real problem is that the home video market has declined. Sure, but that's the same home video market that Hollywood tried desperately to kill, so I'm not sure that's a legitimate argument if you're defending Hollywood.
But, even if we accept the question of the home video market, I'll just point out that, last I checked, Netflix had a valuation over $45 billion. So, at least Wall Street doesn't seem to be too up in arms about the state of the "home video" market.
Of course, every time we post this kind of thing, we're left asking if Hollywood will finally recognize that, maybe, just maybe, piracy isn't the issue they should be focused on. And it never happens. However, let's be optimistic this year and hope that maybe Hollywood will finally come around to realize that the thing it's been saying will kill it hasn't done anything of the sort.
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Filed Under: box office, movie industry, movies, piracy, revenue
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Perhaps, but that's not the point of that response. The Force Awakens is a statistical outlier big enough to skew overall aggregate calculations that include it. Remove it from the numbers and what does the rest of the year look like?
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Copyright Industry Rhetoric Ignores The Existence Of Linux And Wikipedia
Create what people want, and enough will support you one way or another.
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Really?
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Star Wars fans and cinema-goers are not disjoint sets...
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http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2015&p=.htm
States that the total box office would be $9.805 billion. The figures are skewed as that site shows movies in the year they were released (meaning that it includes Star Wars revenue from 2016 but not 2015 revenue from The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies or American Sniper, for example).
Now, that seems to place the box office lower than any year since 2008. But, if you apply the same logic to all other years where there was an "outlier", it goes back to the same sort of position (e.g. Avatar in 2009 would remove $750 million from 2009's box office, making 2015's adjusted result still beat it easily).
Every year has "outliers", the only reason to remove them would be to skew the average lower, which misses the entire point - for all the whining about piracy, people are willing to go to the cinema for the right product. People wanted to see the new Star Wars, yes, but much of its success is due to the fact that they made a good movie. That revenue isn't merely from people going to see the new film, it's from people seeing it multiple times, even though pirated copies are out there for nothing. People aren't doing that for a bad movie, and it can be argued that a lot of the piracy is also merely people who cannot afford to pay multiple times waiting out the DVD release.
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And if Hollywood did manage to kill off the home video market then Hollywood will never be shouting that piracy is costing them millions in lost revenue from the home video market because there wouldn't be any home video market at all due to Hollywood killing it off in the first place.
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The Hollywood View of the worle
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I imagine something similar is happening with piracy as well.
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"Netflix had a valuation over $45 billion"
so they "know" that money should rightfully be in their pockets.
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The goose lays a golden egg everyday, lets cut it open so we don't have to wait... why do we have no more golden eggs?
PIRACY!
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Netflix is becoming "The New Hollywood"
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in order to pass more laws to shut down websites ,block
websites and reduce the rights of internet users as in the
TTP trade agreement,
Netflix proves that people will pay for a service if its priced at a reasonable rate .
There,s a much wider range of programs and films avaidable from netflix or other streaming service,s than could be found in any video rental store .
People always buy dvds, bluerays from amazon and other websites , so of course the rental dvd market is declining .
Even the music industry has moved on,
by working with more music streaming service,s
as they know many people have switched to streaming
rather than buying cd,s or buying music from the itunes store .
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Netflix was going down the drain until they switched gears and started producing original content, instead of just showing other people's works.
Content and its creators are King. And that's the way it should be.
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Link?
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Bullshit, there were pirate copies available in several languages within a weak, despite a huge amount of effort being spent by Disney on "protecting" it.
Why you people lie so much when a 2 second Google search shows how much full of crap you are is beyond me.
"Netflix was going down the drain until they switched gears and started producing original content"
Citation? Unless you are actually allergic to facts, of course.
"Content and its creators are King"
Content means nothing if you fail at the presentation, distribution, marketing and pricing aspects. If nobody sees it, it doesn't matter how good the film is. This attitude is why Netflix have prospered - they actually succeeded at the distribution, while others were too busy working out how to best restrict their own customers.
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Hmmm, no? I went to the cinema after the movie was highly recommended by friends. And it is quite well made. And PaulT is right, there are plenty of available copies online. Pirates don't mind waiting a week or two.
Netflix was going down the drain
Stop. Netflix has been getting bigger and bigger ever since they started delivering what people want. First it was DVDs at home without having to bother with going to the local video rental store then by delivering direct streaming to our homes. As a matter of fact, people have been asking for this kind of delivery model for a while, before Netflix. The fact that Netflix is investing in their own content is because the MAFIAA is a bunch of greedy assholes and are using copyright to restrict access to Netflix while giving their own shitty services a nice discount. Pandora would have a thing or two to teach you about this sort of assfuckery.
Content and its creators are King. And that's the way it should be.
Actually you can have the best content in the world but it means nothing if nobody is seeing it. Youtube is hugely successful because it's a major channel to user generated content. Netflix is a huge success because it delivers content in a quite simple and available way. The MAFIAA titles are successful because of all the marketing and advertisement around there. They know it and they can even make money from total shit if they invest enough in advertising it.
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...I think you forgot your /sarcasm tag.
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Laws and Influence....
We need a reset, all previous law, abolished and thrown out and a new basic 20 year copyright law passed.
You have 20 years from creation to make your money, no inherited rights to works - only value on current contacts entered into before the death of the creator!
After 20 years, everything becomes public domain - you want to make a new copyright start - edit it, remix - NEW!!
Music, movies, books - Oh and keep large corporations out of legislatures. We are in the mess we are in because big money has waxed the ears of politicians to much. Causing them to ignore the cries of those who know better and the public.
Then again, any government created and run by men, when a small number control a large group with legislation - unfairness will prevail. We just have to try and minimize the number of victims. That though is not currently happening at all - Hollywood is playing a victim - but what do you expect they are good at acting!!
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Re: Laws and Influence....
Disagree. Even old/sick creators should be able to negotiate for 20 years of publishing rights or they will get turned down in favor of the young even when having to offer more.
That way each party knows exactly what it is bargaining for. Someone who sold the rights to some work in 1965 would have had no idea that he was selling the proceeds for 95 years or whatever. He is being robbed of his posthumous fame, sinking into oblivion while people dying a few years before him are becoming household names due to their works' public domain status.
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Priacy and Hollywood
No matter how much they scream that piracy is hurting the bottom line, it's not about the bottom line, it's about control. If eliminating piracy even cost the content providers money they'd still be trying to eliminate it.
Because some country that is slated to have the content be available at a certain chosen time get's it two months before it's supposed due to piracy they lose their shit. If people use proxies to access another countries Netflix content they again lose their shit. It's the common dog in a manger attitude that greedy people have.
Even if in truth piracy doesn't hurt their bottom line and in fact helps promote movies they don't care. All they care about is it's their movie/s and they don't want you to have it except through approved channels, which in the end they can manipulate to squeeze more money from the consumer.
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Real creators get angry at those who pirate their works
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The reason people pirate movies is usually easier to download and watch it then go and buy a dvd/wait for shipping.
Even buying bootleg copy's is easier then going to the movie theater sometimes because you are minding your own business and someone sells you the movie for a cheap price.
Sometimes people like the movie enough to download it and already viewed it in theaters, it's a lost dvd sale but isn't as bad as people think.
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Duh
Thank you, piracy.
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Well, there is actually quite a simple solution...
While people watch or play they are mining for the contents creator profit, or if someone uses your footage for their own content, part of the profits in criptocoins are also directed to you, so channels get their share for divulging your content but you also get a slice of it (y)
Play enough of a game with twitch on and enough viewers, you can pay for something to eat and twitch also got a small amount because you, used its server, but it gets from every user every day so it's actually a pretty huge amount when combined.
You watching expending time in a website will generate a small amount to the owner and to you...
I tried to get in contact with a few companies because of this, already, but none of them gave a return, but it really solves the problem...
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It's worth clarifying that that figure reflects just gross sales. Taken as a whole, the global industry takes even greater revenue.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/259985/global-filmed-entertainment-revenue/
I have dim recollections from "The Tech Wars" in the nineties, when Hollywood was trying to strong-arm hardware makers into accepting more and more crap like DVD regionalization, someone somewhere made the observation that Hollywood brought $38B to the US economy, whereas Silicon Valley brought $600B. Hollywood lost the argument.
Sorry, I can't recall where I read that...
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Hollywood Accounting
Somehow Disney WILL find a way to declare the new Star Wars film a total loss and a failure even as it brings in $2bn even before home video is counted or revenue from any of the co-branded crap that came with it. It's going to lose way more than it earns. They'll make it happen.
So of course they see piracy as a loss area. Every damn thing is a loss area. Sure they lost millions of dollars on stolen copies of the Star Wars Christmas Special on DVD, which then never actually made and nobody ever pirated. But if they HAD made those DVDs, they'd have lost money on it, so claim a loss against something that never existed but would have been pirated or lost money if it had existed.
Hollywood accounting IS that full of bullshit. Just wait and watch as Disney simultaneously talks up Lucasfilm results to their shareholders AND declares the whole thing and the movie as terrible, awful, no good lousy losses.
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Inflation adjusted, when you compare 2002 (a particularly up year) to 2015, the box office should have been 12 billion. ticket sales are way down from those peak levels (1.5 billion tickets in 2002, only 1.3 billion in 2015) which means once again, the gross is helped by higher ticket prices and not public demand. From 2012 to 2015, public demand is down 15% or so, even with a billion more people on the planet. It's nowhere near as rosy as you might want to paint it.
So yeah, the numbers are pretty good, but to have a declining numbers of customers in a marketplace that grows nearly 2% a year is not a good thing.
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It's unanswered because it's impossible to answer with any accuracy, no matter which "side" you're on. If anyone claims to know, they're a liar.
Would some people go to the cinema instead of pirating? Maybe. But, other people who pirated have already watched the movie at the cinema and are downloading because the legal Blu isn't available yet, or for smaller films because the title they want to watch is literally not showing anywhere near them since the distribution model is so biased toward large cities and studio tentpoles. Removing piracy, even if this were objectively and realistically possible, may not change these figures at all.
The point is - I don't know and neither do you, but you seem to only blame one thing at the exclusion of all other factors.
"Inflation adjusted, when you compare 2002 (a particularly up year) to 2015, the box office should have been 12 billion."
"Should have?" By which standards? If you're assuming a steady number of customers, you're missing a huge recession and huge growth in competing entertainment options over that timescale, just to mention 2 factors that have nothing to do with piracy, but which affect the market fundamentally. The figures you're concerned about might have as much to do with unemployed people or new parents choosing a videogame or Netflix over their previous cinema visits as anything else.
Given that, the industry looks very healthy, especially as some of the highest grossing movies of all time have been released in that period (and Star Wars is already the 15th domestically highest grossing film of all time - after just 24 days of release - it will end up in the top 10, guaranteed).
But, yeah, it's you so the nearest convenient fantasy is preferable to the complexities of reality, as long as it adheres to your predetermined conclusions.
"It's nowhere near as rosy as you might want to paint it."
Nor is it anywhere near as bleak as the people you relentlessly support wish to paint it.
" From 2012 to 2015, public demand is down 15% or so, even with a billion more people on the planet."
There was a billion more people in what period? 2012 - 2015? Ridiculous. 2002 - 2015? I'd like to see your cited numbers, especially since some markets such as China and India were nowhere near as well serviced in 2002 as they are now. Plus, if you are addressing those countries, I find it notable that you don't include their homegrown movie industries in the figures you're looking at. I wonder why that would be? Would those industries be making enough money locally to offset the "losses" experienced by Hollywood, by any chance?
Funny how you count "the planet" for some figures yet only domestic US figures for others. Seems... inconsistent, if not outright dishonest to me. If you're talking about "losses" for the movie market and including the Chinese population in that equation (for example), it seems intellectually dishonest to exclude the Chinese industry and only talk about the American one...
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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130218/03033922013/bollywood-no-longer-worrying-about-pi racy-as-studios-keep-setting-new-records-box-office.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101222/ 04193712380/how-piracy-helped-establish-dominance-nigerian-films.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/artic les/20100406/1506438902.shtml
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Terrible analogy, but subjectively not any worse than yours.
But your conclusion is based on a faulty premise. Not only is a pirated copy not equivalent to a lost sale, but study after study[1][2][3][4][5] has found that pirates spend more on entertainment content than non-pirates. Why hate your biggest customers?
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150722/06502731723/aussie-study-infringers-spend-more-content-th an-non-infringers.shtml
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-a re-best-customers-this-time-hadopi.shtml
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130513/11270823061/once-again-top-downloaders-are-top-spenders-a ccording-to-uk-govt-study.shtml
[4] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110721/04092915191/industry-suppressed-report-showing-users-shut tered-pirate-site-probably-helped-movie-industry.shtml
[5] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121126/00590921141/dear-riaa-pirates-buy-more-full-stop-deal-wit h-it.shtml
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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/afm-avi-lerner-warns-piracy-747301
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Translated: Yes, my movie was bad, but people go to see bad movies all the time, so why not mine? I had stars!
Other movies that were leaked prior to cinema release:
* Star Wars: The Force Awakens (http://www.idigitaltimes.com/star-wars-force-awakens-leaked-piracy-sites-hardly-made-dent-record-we ekend-box-499111)
* The Revenant (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4143&p=.htm)
* Hateful Eight (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-hateful-eight-70mm-853090)
So the real story is... people pay to see movies they like?
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Hollywood's loss of ticket sales. Boo Hoo.
Also, going to a theater and seeing the movie at home are two entirely different experiences. I think that many people would see a movie more than once if the group they hang with wanted to make a night of it and see it in the theater, especially if they didn't have to pay to see it the first time.
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movies
Do they really think people give a shit about them. If the bitches would learn to keep their mouths shut, and keep their politics to themselves we'd all be better off. I could care less if they all went broke.
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watch movies for free
Do you want to watch movies for free? then download Onebox hd app for your Android/iOS device.
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Record breaking years for movies?
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Should not be encouraged.
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