KnowIT: The movie industry are dead wood – http://knowit.co.nz/2010/06/the-movie-industry-are-dead-wood

Cheers,

Miraz

I used to have a schoolteacher who would say “that may be a reason, but it’s not an excuse”.

I like seeing a vibrant film sector in this country and overseas. It won’t stay that way if it sits, Canute-like, in the oncoming tide of technology.

Colin

I think your “cheaper not to release and then to go after people who download” is highly improbable, given the arse-gouging rates that lawyers charge.

A motto to live by is “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence”. I strongly doubt the movie industry is set up to be agile and respond to surprise hits: movie release schedules are set many months in advance, for example to avoid having two big action adventure movies competing with each other where at all possible. I know this was the case with books: bookstores scheduled their buys, so we had to plan three months in advance. Even if an author turned up with perfect PDF ready for printing, it would be three months before a bookstore had any budget to spend. It may well be the same in movie distribution.

Furthermore, as I understand it most movies are distributed as physical artifacts that cost a lot to reproduce. This is why we foreigners only seem to get American movies after they’ve finished their American run–we’re literally getting the same physical movies the Americans had. Digital distribution is slowly changing this, but the massive cost of “printing” another movie makes it bloody expensive to have worldwide simultaneous release.

So, I’m saying, the current structure of the movie industry may not permit surprise hits to be immediately released in obviously relevant markets. (And every NZ hit movie is a “surprise hit” to an Australian :). Yes, Boy was big in NZ. I figure that means that, a month or so after the movie came out, distributors in Australia could then be told “this is genuinely good”. Then they will have said, “ok, when can you get us the reels, when do we have budget,” and scheduled distribution accordingly far in advance.

What I’m saying is that it’s possible that nobody’s a major villain here. NZ’s film industry may never have been able to have Boy ready for near-simultaneous release in Aus. They may not have been able to quickly react to Boy’s success with a release in Aus. The closest thing to a villain is whoever leaked the screener, because in those circles you MUST know what the consequences of that act will be.