Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.
Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.
Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...
In Blockbuster's heyday their revenue alone surpassed American box office sales.
Oh and merchandising... that's a big one!
This suggests possible changes in business model, but it is really hard to give up an existing revenue stream in order to build future revenue streams that may fit the current world better, especially when the future revenue stream is currently small (e.g., music industry's fight against streaming, which is projected to become a larger revenue stream than physical sales had been - https://www.ft.com/content/94c5cdb0-4a26-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791...)
It's underestimated since it's a global business, plus they there's a very long tail for every movie to turn a profit, DVD/BR releases, TV, and online reselling, renting, etc... and the fact movies remain their property for 75 years+, and for some companies like Disney they retain the copyright forever, and keep sellings goods like cupcakes as well.
This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.
This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.
Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.
But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.
And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
This is because copyright relates to stuff that's usually intangible. People easily grasp the idea of theft when it comes to tangible, physical stuff.
>> And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
True, but digital copies are for the most part still stored on media that can degrade, break or malfunction. In the context of places like TPB, digital copies are indeed degraded as they are often uploaded with lossy compression to reduce file size.
That's a large industry definitely and a powerful one.
But movies are part of Intellectual Property, which is the US's biggest export (in real dollars).