Movie piracy is all bad, right? No good can come from it, right? If a movie makes it onto BitTorrent (as all movies invariably do) then it seriously harms its potential to make big money at the box office, right? Hmm, maybe, maybe not.
Welcome to Hollywood
Hollywood is against movie piracy, and rightly so. It represents people watching content without paying for it. Which is clearly wrong.
If everyone did the same then there would be no Hollywood and no new movies would ever get made. But not everyone does do it, and those who do don’t necessarily stop going to see movies in theaters or stop buying them on DVD and Blu-ray.
Proof of this can be seen in the list of the Top 10 Most Pirated Movies recently compiled by TorrentFreak.
Most Pirated Movies
The Top 10 Most Pirated Movies Of All Time are:
Avatar (21 million downloads)
The Dark Knight (19 million)
Transformers (19 million)
Inception (18 million)
The Hangover (17 million)
Star Trek (16 million)
Kick-Ass (15 million)
The Departed (14 million)
The Incredible Hulk (14 million)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (14 million)
Just take a look at list. A long, hard, intense look at this list. Do you notice anything? Like, for instance, that all of those films made money at the box office. We’re talking serious cash here, with the possible exception of Kick-Ass, which still made a profit and sold well on home video.
So, 21 million people downloaded Avatar, but it’s currently the top-grossing movie of all time, with $2.7 billion taken at the worldwide box office. The Dark Knight took over $1 billion, At World’s End just under $1 billion, and Inception $825 million.
Conclusions
The facts speak for themselves here: being pirated isn’t the kiss of death for a movie. Perhaps it does mean a few million dollars lost here and there, which Hollywood is always going to bitch about, but the bigger picture suggests that if a movie is good it will make money. Regardless of piracy.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, MPAA.
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