Re: Wolverine opens to $87mil, does this kill the piracy hurts argumen
So Wolverine opened to the tune to $87 million this weekend.
It was also the most blatantly, famously, biggest and most advanced pirated movie pretty much ever. The studios say pirating kills the industry. Does this prove them wrong?
Or are they just gonna say Wolverine could have made it to a $110 million opening if it had not been pirated? You think that's true?
Unfortuantly, there's no way of knowing.
Reports say that the slump in the economy isn't hurting the movie business -infact it's helping it- so presumably Wolverine (and any other movie) is going to make as much as it possibly can right now.
$87m isn't a bad opening weekend, esp. considering the "Summer Movie Season" doesn't officially start until Memorial Day Weekend (biggest opening day/weekend of the year) but is it great for what was supposed to be a Summer Blockbuster? It's a movie featuring one of the most popular comic book superheroes!
The stuidos probably would've liked to seen something closer to $100m and they'll think that the leak cost them that $13m. Afterall, people weren't excicted or impressed with the early release, didn't go to see the movie because of it, that's less money in studio's pocket.
And it still all comes down to -no matter what- piracy is wrong. It's stealing. Through and through. It cost the stuido millions to make this movie and they deserve to try and make that money back, something that's not happening when people are downloading it and watching it for free.
In the end, Wolverine will still make money and likely turn a bit of a profit once it leaves theaters and gets the bulk of its DVD sales done, but the bootleg certainly didn't help matters.