> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
I say that having liked expendables 2.
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 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.
I enjoyed the first two...
