17 May 2009
sensible comments on wolverine
November last year I attended a talk about digital piracy by the Industry Trust. Whilst I respect the work that the ‘IT’ undertake some of the comments made by the speakers at this talk seriously got my back up (in fact got my back up to the point that I had to detour via the apple store on route home to type up my rant) as they were hypocritical and misguided about their approaches to combating piracy through alternative distribution models.
However praise be as sanity may be slowly prevailing as in last weeks Guardian box office round up by Charles Gant came some incredibly sensible comments regarding the pre release leak of Wolverine online…
“Based on the comicbook spin-off’s performance at the UK box office, it seems the online piracy of Wolverine has had little effect. The official opening weekend figure is £6.66m, including Wednesday and Thursday previews of £1.87m. Add in the bank holiday Monday takings of £1.9m, and the prequel has grossed £8.56m in six days – far and away the biggest release of 2009 so far.”
Yes that’s right, a film with a high profile online leak still managed to have the highest opening weekend of the year so far (one that even Star Trek failed to beat by a reasonable margin). I’m yet to know whether the leak online was, as some have suggested, a marketing tactic by Fox and would be fascinated to know if this leak might have actually helped the box office.
Although I don’t think that this news is going to open the flood gates on alternative distribution for blockbuster release titles just yet, at least it does give me an alternative response to ’shut up’ next time someone fires at me the line…
“Our film has been pirated online a billion times, therefore we have lost out on a billion sales”
