'Expendables 3' Flops: Is Piracy to Blame? | Hacker News Reader

'Expendables 3' Flops: Is Piracy to Blame?

variety.com

9 pointsbooruguru26 comments

Err, what a joke.

> The Expendables 3″ was widely seen as a litmus test for the impact that piracy can have on a film’s prospects.

How? By what metric? A movie that no one wants to see, that is predictably bad tanked. Trying to blame piracy so that you can justify increasingly anti social measures against your customers is ridiculous. Indeed most people would prob want to be paid to go and see this rather than waste 2 hours on it.

I know a filmmaker and they are fully aware that the marketplace for bad content is very small. Due to internet word of mouth failures are exponentially worse because people these days go to see specific movies and rarely go to see whatever movie happens to be on. They teach courses on this stuff.

This is a studio trying to save face.

Are you actually trying to imply that having a DVD quality leak come out far before the actual movie even hit theaters isn't going to have any effect on the box office results?

There is no proof that I have read that says that is not true. Do you know something I don't which proves that having a leak stops people from going to the theatre?

If it's a good action (rather than a talky drama) movie, it would encourage people to see the movie on a big screen with opening weekend crowds.

> Are you actually trying to imply that having a DVD quality leak come out far before the actual movie even hit theaters isn't going to have any effect on the box office results?

I'm saying that it is demonstrably negligible. For instance before the Casino Royale bond movie made it to cinemas leaks appeared and preemptively the studios made a fuss about this hurting box office figures. Somehow it managed to be the biggest bond release ever.

In fact I would state that the only thing really hurt by leaks are mid level movies that are not good enough to provoke people to go to the cinema.

Further to that I would assert, as others have, that people who often pirate often visit the cinema and would under no circumstances part with money for these mopvies so it economically changes nothing.

That's actually evidence that it could have hurt sales. The biggest bond release ever demonstrably has the most interest ever. The most likely that someone will shell out the cash to see it (as hundreds of millions did). If pirate DVDs got sold, they're more likely than ever to have replaced/supplanted a ticket sale.

Its not fair to say "well they made a lot of money anyway". Its also then true that they lost more money than other movies too.

Your Aristotelian arm chair logic is not how the world works. There is no metric by which it is possible to conceive of something that didn't happen.

Its called revenue estimation, and every business everywhere does it every day.

It could also be evidence that people started watching the rip and decided that it was worth going to see in the theater instead.

If anyone here has seen this movie or any of the other movies in this series then you would know piracy is merely a scapegoat here. It flopped because, well, it's a bad movie with an expendable storyline.

To be honest, I think the studio deliberately leaked the movie because they knew it was going to flop (studios aren't stupid, they loosely know the numbers before a movie debuts) so they could blame piracy instead of the bad storyline and lack of plot.

The inner conspiracy theorist in me thinks the studios leaked the movie so they could push for tougher anti-piracy legislation and lobby harder. Before this, the studios had no real argument, but you can't deny the numbers are atrocious and on paper, it's easy to blame piracy for this instead of the real culprit. It feels very deliberate.

"Expendables 3" scores 35/100 on Metacritic [1]. The original scored 45/100 [2] and "Expendables 2" scored 51/100 [3].

Perhaps it's performing poorly because it's a very poor movie. Or perhaps the leak let people find out in advance it's a very poor movie.

[1] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-expendables-3

[2] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-expendables

[3] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-expendables-2

Couldn't be that it's the third in a mindless action series released once a year. Nah.

I say that having liked expendables 2.

nope: it's just a bad movie.

while I enjoyed the 2nd expendables for its rather funny moments, the 3rd one takes itself very serious. with the lack of comedic moments, it's really just a dull action movie with a dumb story and annoying "characters".

The only way I see wide spread pre-release piracy causing a dent is if the people who watch it early dislike it leading to bad word of mouth.

You mean the piracy of the studio itself leaking the movie on the web in the hopes of creating a little more hype? No.

Isn't Expandables 3 nothing more than a movie attempting to suck the last marrow out of someone's stardom to make a quick buck?

The instinct to watch a movie like this is like being in a waiting room at the doctor's office and picking up a two year old copy of People magazine. I might read it, I might even enjoy it, but there's no way I'm paying for that.

If people are pirating this movie, it means that people want to see these actors regardless of how bad the movie is. The entertainment industry could probably make more money skipping out on the huge production costs and doing Shakespeare with rehashed sets/costumes starring Stallone as Brutus.

Anybody know whether studios are insured against leaked films? If they realize they're not going to make their budget back in ticket-sales, maybe they're seeking to cover their costs using other methods.

I have read of securitization [1] as one way but am not very sure about insurances.

Much of it was before the 2008 era but still think a lot is happening behind the scenes for it to flourish in the secularization markets overall.

[1]: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/04/us-markets-credit-... [2]:https://www.moodys.com/research/MOODYS-RATES-MARVELS-FILM-SE...

Maybe there are better ways to reduce piracy... How about a global, cross-platform release date for films? Pay to stream a movie to your device, or watch at a cinema.

I saw it in theaters, and piracy is not to blame, sorry. I liked the first two, but this one was just not as good. They tried too hard to bridge the gap with a "new generation" of Expendables, and less about our old-school action heroes blowing shit up (which is the entire point of these). And Terry Crews only had a bit part which sucked because he's the funniest of the bunch.

Since Expendables 3 supposedly sucks, I bet a high percentage of the losses were due to people pirating/watching the film and telling their friends how shitty it was, resulting in them going to see something else.

When a studio allows movie reviewers to see a film before release, are they allowed to influence/censor the reviewer from telling others that the movie is bad?

Often early screenings come with an embargo date. Basically by going to the screening you agree not to publish anything before that date. I've even heard of studios forcing reviewers to sign an actual NDA.

That being said I've never heard of a studio suing a reviewer for breaking the embargo. The worst that often happens is that the reviewer gets some angry calls from a studio PR person and then the reviewer and/or the reviewer's employer isn't sent any more early screening or industry party invitations for a while.

It's out?

I enjoyed the first two...

No, it probably flipped because it's a ridiculous and bad movie. End of story.

Come on, this is a total crap.

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