3D = Anti piracy?
As recently reported, Avatar now holds the title of highest grossing film of all time.
Furthermore, the film has grossed over $800 million more than Hollywood’s previous blockbuster, 2008’s The Dark Knight.
Given that the themes and story quality of both films was equally awful, the only explanation (in my opinion at least) is that the piracy level of Avatar must be significantly lower than that of The Dark Night. The explanation for this I believe lies in that fact that one film was presented in 3D, while the other was not.
Thus, as the lay pirater is without 3D technology, has Hollywood inadvertently found a (short-term) solution to it’s declining revenue problem: making films in 3D?
Something that might help is that Avatar was reported as having made $80 million in China, the hotbed of movie piracy and therefore notorious for seeing poor performances from cinema releases – compare the relevant figures for Avatar and the Dark Knight and you could be a lot surer, I think. Unfortunately as i have just found out, TDK was not released in China at ALL due to ‘cultural sensitivities’. So maybe some other blockbuster – Titanic?
Media pirating is a failure of the market to respond to the demands of consumers. I suspect these figures are massively underestimated. People haven’t suddenly become more dishonest, cinema is just in long term decline. If you have a HD projector/TV, 5.1 surround sound, a reclining leather sofa, a fridge full of beer and snacks – why would you want to go to the cinema? It takes most films 6-9 months to become available to home consumers – because the film industry insist we must go to the cinema to watch new films. It used to make sense when cinema’s had a distinct technological advantage. Now they don’t, but the industry is clinging on to the business model.
Time to innovate. How about charging £20 for a 24/48 hour home licence for the new film and make it available for download? Minimal overheads for producers/distributors and mass market exposure (the internet is straight to market!).
This won’t happen, not because its a bad idea, but because it would be revolutionary and the fat cats have their fingers in the cinema pie.
avatar is yep lower than dark night but the creativity they had was unforgetable and most important they had some thing new not the comic always
Another option maybe (well for NZ at least) is that it costs nearly twice as much to see a 3D movie, thus the more revenue. Same numbers of people, but larger ticket cost. What would be interesting to see is scaling movie revenue to a fixed ticket price, so then compare actual ticket sale, not inflation… But suspect that would be a negative outcome for modern movies, so we don’t hear that stat.
“Given that the themes and story quality of both films was equally awful, the only explanation (in my opinion at least) is that the piracy level of Avatar must be significantly lower than that of The Dark Night.”
What …
Dark Knight had a story, some of the acting was a little weak – but it had depth.
Avatar was an overblown, slow moving, poorly acting, graphical wankfest – although it was pretty it had as much depth as a thimble.
I actually thought the movie was really good. The story is the typical archtypical story of good vs evil