MPAA Brags About How Awesome The Movie Business Is; Right After It Claims File Sharing Is Destroying The Industry

from the two-faced dept

You gotta love the MPAA for the sheer Hollywood brashness of two recent press releases, that the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro decided to compare and call the MPAA on its blatant dishonesty. The first press release, from back in December, was all about how the internet and file trading were killing the industry:

Yet our industry faces the relentless challenge of the theft of its creative content, a challenge extracting an increasingly unbearable cost.

Now, we already knew that wasn't true, and were among those who pointed out that the industry had just experienced its best year at the box office ever. And, of course, that's what the second press release was about. It was the MPAA bragging about what an awesome year Hollywood had in 2009.

Of course, the MPAA spokesperson that Pegoraro spoke to pulled out the usual claim that while the box office may be doing great, it's the secondary market (DVDs and such) that are suffering from all those nasty internet people. Of course, this is quite ironic, since the MPAA fought about as hard as possible against the very concept of a secondary market, with former MPAA boss Jack Valenti once declaring: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." For the MPAA to now whine that the very secondary market it fought so hard to prevent from existing is now shrinking is the height of ridiculousness.

And, of course, even that claim by the MPAA isn't accurate. It pointed Pegoraro to a report that it claimed supported this claim of file sharing killing the DVD market -- but Pegoraro notes that the report actually notes the decline in sales of DVDs isn't because of file sharing, but because of a better, more efficient rental market. Of course, the MPAA and Hollywood are also trying to stop that new rental market from existing as well (another Boston strangler, huh?) by falsely pointing to a study which it pretends says that Redbox and Netflix are killing jobs in Hollywood -- but which actually notes jobs will grow.

Basically, it looks like Hollywood will repeatedly say the exact opposite of what research shows in its quest to get ever greater protectionist policies out of the US government, even as it's absolutely thriving, despite an economic downturn.

Filed Under: movie business, mpaa, studies
Companies: mpaa