1. Project X - 8,720,000 downloads
2. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - 8,500,000
3. The Dark Knight Rises - 8,230,000
4. The Avengers - 8,110,000
5. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - 7,850,000
6. 21 Jump Street - 7,590,000
7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - 7,420,000
8. The Dictator - 7,330,000
9. Ice Age: Continental Drift - 6,960,000
10. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 - 6,740,000
Your first thought might be to think of how much money they've lost with all these downloads. Well, the lowest of the bunch in terms of worldwide gross was Project X at over $100 million. The most was The Avengers, which earned $1.5 BILLION.
 |
| More like Project Sux in comparison to Avengers, am I right? |
Still, people will think in black/white terms that each one of these downloads is another $10 ticket they lost out on. If Project X could have gotten $10 out of every one of those downloads, they'd have doubled their money. Damn you, piracy people, for screwing us out of half our income!
That's not true. How many people do you know actually download something that they would have watched in theaters and they see it only one time? I know none. Out of that list, I've seen The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, and Sherlock Holmes. All of them were movies I've seen in theaters. In fact, I went to the marathon for Avengers, so they got $40 out of me instead of $15.
The bigger question is whether or not I would download something INSTEAD of seeing it in theaters, as opposed to whether or not I've downloaded it period. If there's a movie I'm a fan of and I want to support it, I will always be in line at midnight. I did it with Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises (and all of those films in those series), I did it with Skyfall, so on. If a movie really makes me interested (like Wreck-It Ralph) to the point where I have to go see it, I'll go pay my money to see it - although the cost is far too high and it pisses me off but we'll get into that another day. However, if a movie just isn't interesting enough for me to want to pay to see it, then I have two options that I always have to decide between:
A) Watch it through some free method [download it, borrow a friend's DVD]
B) Never see it
In both scenarios, the box office gets no money from me. With the ticket prices and the concession costs being so high, myself and many others simply would rather choose not to see a film AT ALL. Why risk spending all that money when so much of what comes out ends up as shit anyway? Why reward the companies that would very gleefully throw garbage on the screen to make a profit of a dollar? And if you really think about it, wouldn't you rather me download your movie, watch it, like it (if it doesn't suck), and tell other people about it? That word of mouth can translate to THEM going to the movies to see it, or at the very least, any of us buying your DVD when it comes out, which never would have been the case if I had chosen to just opt out of seeing it entirely.
Food for thought, movie industry. You give us good quality things that people can see, tell others about, and it develops a good reputation, then people will see it and pay you for it. A movie like Avengers breaks records because of what it is and how good it is, not because it has less downloads than Project X. If you'll excuse me, my downloads are complete.
0 comments: