Thursday, April 02, 2009

Film Piracy Rears Its Head Again

I have to confess that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was not particularly high on my list of "must-see movies" for this year and indeed the only big ticket movie I'm really intent on seeing, James Cameron's Avatar, isn't due out till December.  I'd also like to point out that I'm not a fan of the way 20th Century Fox, as a studio, have handled their Marvel properties, basically butt-fucking everything from the X-Men franchise to Fantastic Four to Daredevil.

Still, the thought that something like 90% of the movie has been released on torrents really pisses me off.

I appreciate that video piracy is quite the equalizer considering the way DVDs used to be priced and considering the way Blu Ray discs still are priced now, but the thing about downloading movies before their release doesn't just hurt the home video market; it hurts the moviemaking industry itself. I've already gone on about this at length in an older post, but I think it is worth adding that in this day and age of internet, where millions of people can download from a single site, some real damage can be done. This isn't the age of the bootleg betamax or VHS tape; it's a lot more serious.

Good for you if you're out to destroy Hollywood, which is admittedly a pretty ugly place these days capable of producing some really trashy product, but not if you actually love movies. I never could reconcile my late best friend's proclamation that he loved movies with the fact that just about every video in his collection was pirated, even the small, independent movies.

I'll agree that, quite often, studios need to be cut down a peg or two and piracy can be a good way to do it, and maybe, just maybe, that's a little slap in the face Fox needs to start taking their Marvel Properties seriously, lest Marvel buy them back and start making the X-Men, FF and Daredevil actually watchable again.  So fine.

But let's not delude ourselves that these torrent bastards are champions of the people. Please.

1 comment:

Ryan said...

had a long comment but it got erased