Aliens abroad
This story in today’s Variety seems to run counter to last week’s post about how studios often delay releasing movies overseas in an attempt to reduce piracy:
Russia and Ukraine aren’t the usual launching pads for Hollywood event pics, so it came as a surprise when Paramount and DreamWorks Animation decided to open 3-D toon “Monsters vs. Aliens” in those markets first.
Why would they do that? Wouldn’t that make it more likely to get bootlegged?
Ah, but wait:
In a precautionary move to ward off pirates, Paramount supplied only dubbed prints of “Monsters” to Russian and Ukrainian theaters.
Animation works well dubbed, and most crucially, a cam in Russian or Ukranian is not particularly useful worldwide.
Articles
March 25th, 2009 at 11:25 am
I spent nearly four years in Japan where nearly every release is severely delayed, and if anything that delay contributes to greater piracy, especially with high profile films.
March 25th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
John, it’s important to note the difficulties of subtitling a 3D movie. I was reading about that recently. I am from Brazil and every single 3D pic that was released here, from children animations to teens horror, were dubbed. Studios obviously knows that, still worth the mention. Cheers!
March 25th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Plus, camming a 3D movie is pretty much impossible.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
@Marcel:
You probably can’t do subtitles the same way, but my guess is that there will quickly become a new technique. Text, particularly titles and credits, can look terrific in 3D. So there’s no reason they can’t come up with a good way to do it.
@Toni:
Ah, but my readers have figured out ways…
Also, cams for MvA are already showing up online.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
So, English-speaking pirates only need to bring a voice recorder to the movie? A perfect plan, indeed.
And for Russians it means that we will never see a movie without voiceover.
«Why don’t you have a one goddamn theater showing movies without voiceover? C’mon, guys, think about tourists, or something! — NO. It’s a pirate caountry. You are all pirates! — Uh, ok, thanks.»
March 25th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
I used to work amid the international releases for one of the studios. As it was explained to me, a large number of pirated features are tracked back to Russia, so they will open in Russia as close to the U.S. release date as possible (often the same weekend, aka “day-and-date”) to shorten the window of opportunity for the bootleg to detour paying moviegoers. Comparatively, significantly fewer bootlegs are tracked back to Japan, so yes, they still have significantly delayed releases.
While I’m at it… I was shocked to learn how deeply involved organized crime is with piracy. Piracy is an international business, what with most bootlegs originating from outside the U.S., and there are large, sophisticated operations that move features around the world, often cutting in their own translated V.O. tracks or subtitles. A feature can be cammed in Russia and show up on the streets of a dozen countries in as many languages in less than 36 hours. And I’m not talking about online. The money is in DVD sales on the street, and it rakes in millions. But why would organized crime bother, you ask? The price tags might not be as high, but the profit margins are significantly larger than drugs or guns AND the risk of a lengthy prison sentence is significantly lower. Nobody’s going to death row for selling Spiderman 3 to a kid in Korea.
@arimanoff. The mentality isn’t that an entire country is full of pirates. It’s a numbers game. The studios are just trying to identify places with higher likelihood of piracy.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Oh yeah, they’ve actually already came up with something. Missing details here, but involves extra projections specifically for the subtitles. Obviously, it costs money and I’ve read that’s the main reason pics are showing dubbed in Brazil. Same rules must apply for Russia and Ukraine. Don’t really know. Anyway, this makes the studio’s move to be even more smart.
But I get the feeling that these markets also work as test-audience for those releases. I remember some time ago, “Jason X” was released in Brazil before the US, and that seemed to be goal: test the movie.
Question: Just watched the Battlestar Galactica series finale and the last TV special. Don’t know if you’re into the series, but I love it. How long before does a screenplay for a series finale gets written?
March 26th, 2009 at 1:27 am
I don’t get piracy… If you really want to see a flick so badly that you can’t wait for it to show in theaters or come out on dvd, why would you want to watch it in fuzzy shaky crappovision on your laptop??
March 26th, 2009 at 1:33 am
I’ve seen the cammed pirate copy of Watchmen that’s now selling on the streets here in Beijing (hideous quality, obviously, and I long for the blue, Blu-rays of home).
Interestingly, the English audio track is obviously telesynced, and occasionally drops out completely leaving sizeable chunks of the movie in Russian, that audio obviously having been captured along with the video in the movie theater.
So it seems this strategy isn’t going to do much good. A dubbed Russian print is still the one doing the damage and the audio has just been independently sourced from a conveniently lax English-exhibiting market.
I also suspect that the tactic of releasing in Russia, whatever its upward pressure on the box office there, must be puny in the face the hundreds of millions that release will instantly generate for the pirates in the Chinese market. The studios’ returns here must be tragically small, seeing as practically no films are approved for release on the one hand, but also that the entire Chinese filmed entertainment economy is fundamentally one now based on piracy. It’s the normal state of affairs. Nobody here actually, y’know, pays a massive premium and physically goes to the movies. It’s disconcerting.
March 26th, 2009 at 3:09 am
“The money is in DVD sales on the street, and it rakes in millions.”
I’m in London at the moment and this seems to be rampant — even had someone come up to us at a restaurant selling bootleg DVDs. Puts a new spin on the old ‘dinner and a movie’ I suppose.
March 26th, 2009 at 5:07 am
Not sure about their strategy. It’s pretty trivial to just switch the language track when one comes available. I’m pretty sure there a groups out there that focus on finding the best quality video and the best quality sound and combining them together.
March 26th, 2009 at 7:09 am
Why would you watch it on your laptop when you can easily use any number of devices to watch the movie on your flat screen tv ?
March 26th, 2009 at 8:43 am
@Grimace
And your point is? It’s will be pirated, one way or another. It’s inevitable. It takes a shorp bus trip from Saints Petersburg, Russia to Helsinki, Finland. Or from some city in Ukraine to some city in Poland. Or from Poland to Germany. Or…
Whatever. You can’t show people a movie and prevent them from copying it.
(and now, sorry for a very long comment in a very broken English. I can’t stand all that “piracy” and “organised crime” anymore. I’m really reaaly sorry)
And for the organised crime, at least in Russia and Ukraine… Studios made it organised, and studios, if you think about it for a second, made it a crime.
It’s a Napster/p2p/online piracy all over again, just, you know, 10 years eralier.
Nobody, and i mean NOBODY, thought about ex-USSR as a market for media products.
Pepsico? CHECK. Coca-Cola Company? CHECK McDonalds, Nestle, KFC, any other junk food franchise? You guess.
And media companies? I don’t know. I didn’t see one in 1992. And i saw tons and tons of VHS, in plain boxes, with handmade (on a typewriter, no less!) stickers. “Pulp Fiction & Jacky Chan Legend of the Drunken Master & 2 series of unknown anime”. On a 240 minute TDK cassete. Awful. With the terrible voicover. “I’ll take that. And a Snickers. Aaand a bottle of Cola”.
Piracy? Err, piracy what?
It was a public domain for us. Because, you know, nobody clamed it.
And then, some years later, then I was in college, I ran a video piracy… erm… outlet? With my brother and some friends. Anime, mostly. Nobody watched it back then (and i still can’t stand it). My profit from 3 years of operation? Well, about 1500 USD in expenses (CD burners just died after 1500 or so CD-Rs, HDDs, blank discs, etc). Oh, and 3000-4000 CDs with anime (eww) and Asian movies, and other stuff. All right, it was more of a trade hub (we never asked for money), but it WAS an organised crime ring, distributing copyrighted material left and right, yeah?
Sure. But you were’t able to go and buy your anime. THERE WASN’T ANY.
And now some of my friends run a small but perfectly legal publishing studio (it’s niche, it’s fanboyish even for anime publisher, but still).
Organised crime, my ass. It’s international publishers who pushed those guys on the same scene with carders, drugdealers and whatnot.
Don’t get me wrong, those people weren’t angels. In the late nineties thwy started to grow big, they made money, they asked for trouble. But they were publishers. Distributors. They even made localized software, huh. It was their business. And Big Publisher didn’t give a damn.
And then Big Publisher came and said “Game Over, kids. Goodbye!” Surprise!
I don’t know why The Legal Owners didn’t try and lure illegals into cooperation, with all distribution channels and stuff. Maybe they tried and failed. Some pirates, as i remember, eventually came to the dark side. Or is it light side? Whatever.
But in 1999 I saw the first batch of OMG LEGAL RUSSIAN DVDs. 40-55 dollars apiece. And some days later, I found pirated versions for, maybe, 6 USD. It was a perfect copy of R1 (American) DVD, and it was still unreleased in Russia.
No, no, i won’t say major publishers just could’n learn from mistakes: today, R5 DVDs cost maybe a dollar more than a pirated version of it (and cointerfeit version even comes in a pretty cardboard sleeve, just like, erm, original; but quality may vary widely and wildly). Same story for PC games (but NOT for console versions of said games, which goes for 10-15 dollars MORE than in Europe).
Oh, and you could buy R5 DVDs while movie is still in theaters… and The Pirate Bay patrons just LOVE R5 rips.
And then majors start complaining about P2P.
C’mon, guys! It’s your fault, really. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Aaaaaand — oh horror! the horror! — there IS broadband in Russia and Ukraine. It’s shocking news, I know.
(That said, i still prefer cold hard R1 DVD, Amazon flavor.)
P.S. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: everybody remembers that joke with the DVD region code? It kinda blowed, ok. But now “they” try to repeat it, this time on the Internet. Geotargeting, yeah. “You have a wrong IP, GET OFF OF MY LAWN!”. Yeah, yeah, guys, ok, we understand, “this video is not available in your country”, thanks a lot, we, kids from what you call the B.R.I.C. Countries, we understand you. We understand that you can use that geotargeting for placing these signs on your, ahem, Intellectual Property, but can’t use exactly that system to show us local ads and stuff and whatnot. Thanks again, guys, it’s your Business Model, all right. We don’t respect your Intellectual, ahem, Property, after all. OK. All right. No harm’s done. We don’t speak English, so it’s not that we could blog something unpleasant to you, or get an editorial in Wired, or anything.
Dear rightholders and publishers and everybody, ladies and gentlemen! Please take this Middle Finger of Understanding and Gratitude and… and try not to cry when you realise that you lost your Business Model to some “pirates” in our unwashed internets. Thanks.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Would it help to release movies domestically and internationally at the same time?
March 26th, 2009 at 9:49 am
@nyc/cr
In many cases, yes, it is believed that simultaneous release helps. These days, big movies are indeed released in key countries same day, or within a day or two, as U.S. Not all movies, and not all countries, and it’s debatable how much effect that really has, but that’s been the trend the last few years.
March 26th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
@Grimace
The simultaneous release sure helps, but…But somebody will pirate your movie even if eastern part of Eurasia drowns tomorrow, just ike Atlantis.
Or release it in theaters, on DVD, on Blu-ray and as a digital download — same day, worldwide. Do sometning!
And while we’re at that…. Bring Netflix, iTunes Store, hulu.com and all that stuff to Russia, India, Brazil and Africa. And bring it BEFORE everybody and her dog get a 3G modem and a netbook. And before that dog learn about P2P.
And before another couple thousand young people goes to jail for piracy, tax evasion and, ahem, Organized Crimes.
(By the way, people in rural areas of Russia, and, as far as i know, of all the world, people who doesn’t have internet access and often dosn’t even have a computer… those people using their cellphones to trade music and short video clips. And soon they will buy their first netbook. )
And american publishers still trying to blame Evil Russians for shaky cam releases.
Oh humanity!
March 26th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
@arimanoff
There are bootleggers all over the world. Nobody is claiming it’s just “Evil Russians.”