Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 12 months, you’ll know that The Dark Knight has been absolutely huge this year. But the Batman movie is also the most pirated movie of 2008. Does this put answer Hollywood cries that piracy is killing its business?
The Dark Knight – Huge Success
Let’s be clear here – The Dark Knight has been phenomenally successful. It is the second highest grossing film of all time, with only Titanic managing to take more than the $1 billion the latest Batman film has already managed.
But the success story doesn’t end there. The Dark Knight also sold 3 million copies on DVD on its first day of release in the U.S., Canada, and the UK. It also managed record Blu-ray sales. And there are plans to re-release the movie in theaters around the world early next year for those who missed out the first time around.
The Dark Knight Pirates
The Dark Knight has also been a big player on the piracy scene this year. The first pirated copy made its way on to the Web just 38 hours after it was released. The fact that Warner Bros. saw this as a victory shows how rattled the movie studios are by the speed and efficiency demonstrated by online pirates time after time.
The Pirate Bay used this early pirate copy leaking on the Internet as a publicity opportunity, changing its name to ‘The Pirate Bat’ and even publishing a special logo commemorating the occasion (as seen below).
The MPAA
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has consistently tried to get The Pirate Bay closed down but has always being thwarted by fact that The Pirate Bay’s base of operations is in Sweden, out of the jurisdiction of U.S. copyright law.
Now, according to TorrentFreak, The Dark Knight has been the most pirated movie of 2008, topping a list of 10 movies found to have been downloaded the most times on the popular BitTorrent trackers.
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2008
1. The Dark Knight
2. The Incredible Hulk
3. The Bank Job
4. You Don’t Mess With The Zohan
5. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
6. Juno
7. Tropic Thunder
8. I Am Legend
9. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
10. Horton Hears a Who!
Piracy Harms Hollywood – Really?
How interesting that the biggest box-office smash is also the most downloaded movie of the year. Of course, it’s to be expected that a movie as huge as The Dark Knight would be in great demand on torrents but the truth is that piracy doesn’t seem to have harmed the movie at all.
The fact is that if the movie studios make great films then people will still flock to see them on the big screen regardless of whether they can see them for free online. Consumers do however resent paying to see a stinker of a film.
Conclusions
This obviously doesn’t excuse piracy at all and I’m sure the movie studios would burn me at the stake before admitting piracy seemed to have no effect on the viability of The Dark Knight at the box office.
Maybe if the movie studios dedicated more time, money, and resources to making the best films they could, and ones people actually wanted to see, rather than chasing Internet pirates, Hollywood wouldn’t be in the mess it currently is.
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