Piracy fills movie studio bank account?
Written on May 4, 2009 by chris
It appears Wolverine made a ton of money this past weekend. Sort of surprising given the huge s-storm that went down when a work print was leaked online. Despite this the film about a borderline immortal scruffy Canadian raked in 87 million over the weekend. I’ll say that again for the sake of clarity – 87 million dollars. So much for piracy being the end of entertainment…
From Zero Paid:
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to our feedLast month a workprint of “X-Men:Origins: Wolverine” leaked to BitTorrent, and many in the movie industry worried that it would harm ticket sales, a fear compounded by the current economic downturn and the spread of swine flu.
Those concerns were unwarranted with news that the movie raked in an estimated $87 million in ticket sales this past opening weekend.
How it stacks up to other X-Men movies:
- X-Men (2000) – $54 million
- X2: X-Men United (2003) – $86 million
- X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) – $102 million
Many, myself included, watched the workprint copy, but knew its lack of special effects and visible tether lines would still make watching it in the theaters necessary to see the finished product 20th Century Fox insisted it wasn’t.
“I started watching it online but didn’t finish because it didn’t have any of the special effects,” said theatergoer Jason Nguyen outside of the AMC Burbank 16 before a Friday show. “It seemed like something you would just watch on the DVD after seeing the real movie. I just didn’t think watching that would compare to watching the finished one with all the special effects.”
Another point to be made is that many so-called pirates will still pay to see a good movie despite having illegally downloaded a copy. “The Dark Knight” was the most pirated movie of all time, yet still managed to rake in more than $1 billion worldwide.
