Image: SuppliedOn February 10 2017, audiences around the world will be sitting down in cinemas to watch the much anticipated LEGO: Batman movie. 48 days later, Australians can do the same. Wait, what?
Village Roadshow is repeating history, making the same mistake it made with The LEGO Movie. A five million dollar mistake. A mistake co-CEO Graham Burke said the distributor would not be making again.
Everything is not awesome.
@BrickingAround LEGO Batman will be released in Australia on 30th March, 2017.
— Roadshow Films (@RoadshowFilms) December 5, 2016
Piracy of The LEGO Movie cost Village Roadshow "somewhere between $3.5 and $5 million in sales" Burke revealed at a government-led Copyright Forum back in September 2014.
"We made one hell of a mistake with LEGO," Burke said of the decision to delay The LEGO Movie's release in Australia by 54 days.
"We'll now make all our movies day in date with the US. I know 20th Century Fox are and Universal are too."
Adding insult to injury both films were created here by Animal Logic, and the CEO Zareh Nalbandian has spoken out about piracy in the past, expressing a wish to teach kids about the impacts of piracy on creators before they become teenagers and stop caring.
So why, two years later, is this happening again? Expect to hear reasons like "school holidays" and "maximising audiences" being floated, but we've reached out to Village Roadshow for an official comment.
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Comments
Seriously when will these idiots learn? While I am anti-piracy, I just see time and time again the studios making stupid decisions like this and then blaming piracy for everything from global warming to cancer. Make it easy to legitimately access the movie and a good majority of people will pay for it. Make it difficult and you lose. It's that simple.
They think because they have the law on their side, They can do what they want. But they are loosing the battle badly.
The music has slowly changed for the better but the movie industry is stuck in the past
To perform the same act yet expect different results is - delusional.
I move that an estimate be made of losses again, within 3 to 6 months of the release.
I also move that the company be compensated for the loss of revenue.
Said compensation to come directly from the pay packets of the CEOs of Village Roadshow.
Maybe they'll be more serious if their own money is put on the line.
Considering that the US release date is just after school goes back for the year in Australia...
1) There will be very few familes with children going to see it during the day on Mon-Fri. Parents at work. Kids at school.
2) In the evenings on Mon-Fri it's likely that the parents will be busy doing stuff around the house.
3) That leaves weekends. Assuming it's at the cinema for a month, that's a whole 8 days which will have the majority of children with families going to see it.
The proposed release date is in the school holidays. All you need to do is look at the Australian box office to see that apart from last year, the holiday period is far more lucrative.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/australia/?currency=local&yr=2016&p=.htm&sort=wknum&order=ASC
RE 1) above, the US release is when US schools are in session. Why is it any different to Australia?
Looks, sounds, smells and feels like entrapment to me.
History repeating itself. If they treat us like fools we will take our money elsewhere and pirate the content they are trying to screw us on, similarly to how we pirate game of thrones. Given the media attention on this though, be wary of honey pots and always use a VPN!
Given what happened in the Dallas Buyers Club case, isn't the worst pirates can expect just to pay a fair price for a single copy of the movie?
Forget pirating - the new way is to stream it. You're not keeping a copy - it would be much harder for content owners to sue you for copyright infringement since all you're doing is visiting a website. Just keep those anti-virus apps and ad blockers running, you can watch almost anything via streaming.
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