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Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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