New Batman breaks box-office record
p2pnet news view | Movies:- The latest Batman flick, the Dark Knight, “rewrote the box-office record books last weekend as audiences flocked to see late actor Heath Ledger in his last completed film role, figures have shown,” says Agency France-Presse, going on:
“The film raked in 158.4 million dollars, crushing the previous North American box-office opening record of 151.1 million held by “Spider-Man 3″, industry tracker Exhibitor Relations said.”
hmmmm.
That must mean all those kids with camcorders and video cellphones were stymied by alert movie industry enforcers strategically located at entrances and prowling the aisles with military style night vision goggles.
Otherwise, the flick wouldn’t have been such a raging success.
Right?
Well, not exactly.
Because it seems least one camcorded copy hit the P2P networks just after Dark Knight was officially released. And then, of course, there were all the other copies we didn’t get to hear about.
“Prior to ‘The Dark Knight,’ ‘Spider-Man 3′ had led the all-time opening weekend figures from 2006’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2′ (135.6 million) and 2007’s ‘Shrek the Third’ (121.6 million),” says AFP.
“The performance of ‘The Dark Knight’ helped the overall box-office to a record three-day take of 260 million dollars.”
The above-mentioned movies were also all over the networks, and still are.
No starving set designers have been thrown into the street. No make-up artists or writers or any of the other thousands of people working on the thousands of jobs which go with the movie industry have been lost.
Somehow, Hollywood continues to survive.
.
.Stumble It!
Agency France-Presse – ‘The Dark Knight’ rewrites box-office record books, July 22, 2008
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July 22nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
It will still be advertised as billions were lost in revenue due to P2P no matter how much they make even if a copy is download 3 times the MPAA and the media will exaggerate the possible lost revenue and the amount they actually made will disappear. Amazing, that if they make a good product people still buy it, and those same people are call thieves when they download crap then delete it because it is crap.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:26 am
As with music albums, it’s undeniably true that p2p certainly does hurt a movie’s box-office profits — but primarily bad movies. No movie theater gives a refund if a person decides that the movie is so bad that it’s not even worth sitting through. Downloading a sample to preview, although illegal, would have prevented that situation. People who like the download are still going to go out and watch it at the cinema.
This could be the same reason why sequels dominate the list of top-grossing movies: people hate the thought of getting ripped off seeing a film that fails to live up to its advertising, but would gladly pay their money to see a movie that they’re already familiar with.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:50 am
It’s good that the Hollywood is still raking it in. Otherwise, I’d probably be forced to pay a ‘tax’ on every DVD I buy, the vast majority of which I use to make weekly backups of my pc’s hard drive.
…or maybe their windfall profit would make little difference. The record industry was making record profits years ago when they put the chokehold on governments to pass a law charging fees on all audio cassette tapes, regardless of the fact that many tape recorders were used for non-music recording such as college lectures.
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
“As with music albums, it’s undeniably true that p2p certainly does hurt a movie’s box-office profit”. I highly doubt that although it sounds reasonable at face value. What IS undeniable is that real piracy affects DVD sales, though most people won’t be crying about that.
I read one user comment on this Batman cam who said it was the best movie he’d ever seen. Of course he didn’t mention it was the only one he’d seen, as he just left home and his parents are Seventh Day Adventists who don’t watch TV or movies, though come to think of it that’s not such a bad idea. But seriously I wouldn’t go that far. It may be the best Batman movie so far.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:15 pm
“It may be the best Batman movie so far.”
Possibly, for those of you who don’t despise Christian Bale and his so-wooden-it-came-from-a-lumber-yard performance.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Highly overrated film…
I think most people are praising it because of some seemingly posthumous obligation to heath ledger. Truly, I was bored for the first 20 minutes of it, and the rest wasn’t much better.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:45 am
But Ledger was brilliant, IMHO.
Cheers!
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 am
WHAT !!!!!! You pay to go to the movies Jon?
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:16 am
Yup. When it’s worth it. And when my daughter (12) nags me into it
We saw Wall-E and Hancock as well — and before you ask Yes, I previewed both online in advance. But we saw Batman without the benefit of the P2P networks.
We live on Vancouver Island in BC, Canada, and our local movie-house is an oldie — well maintained and fine for our needs. When we take in flick, we always go to the matinees for which we pay $5.25. And since but we don’t buy the hugely overpriced popcorn and burp-water, that’s it.
The only real drawback is: we live in a small village about half an hour away so we also have to count in the increasing price of fuel.
Cheers!