Disney Should Tell 'Pirates' Hackers To Go Walk The Plank
Deadline reports that high-tech hackers have stolen a copy of Walt Disney's upcoming
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales two weeks before its May 26th opening day. The group threatens,
so says The Hollywood Reporter, to release the Johnny Depp sequel in pieces, starting with the five-minute prologue and then in additional 20-minute chunks.
Disney CEO Bob Iger is currently refusing to pay a ransom, which means he is ignoring the advice of both the
FBI's hacker units and Delroy Lindo. Disney is right to call their bluff. While the film being available online prior to release wouldn't help the box office, recent history shows that it wouldn't do that much damage, either.
Now, for the record, online piracy is usually disastrous for a film. It can have horrific consequences for countless smaller and art-house offerings that end up on torrent sites the minute they are released via video-on-demand platforms. And even with the major studios, online piracy still hurts a movie like
Midnight Special a heck of a lot more than
Batman v Superman, which in turn discourages studios from distributing movies of that nature. At the end of the day, it's still the online equivalent of shoplifting.
Removing morality from the equation for a moment, I would argue that the potential online leakage of
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest will have minimal effect on the film's global box office take.
We've seen this play out a few times over the last decade, and pretty much every major case has had little to no effect on the eventual box office earnings. The online release of a DVD-quality copy of Liam Neeson's
Taken, the R-rated version no less, was available online months before the film's theatrical release in early 2009.
Taken and Clint Eastwood's
Gran Torino, which also got leaked during what is now a regular part of the awards season (critics groups and awards groups get DVD screeners of award-friendly movies and those films tend to end up online), also did boffo box office that year, earning $145 million and $148m respectively in North America alone.
And in April 2009, a DVD-quality workprint of
X-Men Origins: Wolverine somehow popped up online a month before its release. We all speculated as to the financial effect, but in the end, the terribly reviewed film still opened with $85 million and ended up with $373m worldwide, with a vibrant post-theatrical lifespan. Since then, the most high-profile leak of a major movie came in August 2014, when
The Expendables 3 was released in a DVD-quality copy three weeks prior to launch. That film was indeed a box office failure, earning just $39 million domestic and $214m worldwide against a $100m budget.
As tempting as it is to blame piracy, and without entirely discounting the illegal availability of said film, the real culprit was franchise fatigue in that scenario and the
choice to go with a PG-13 rating for what was supposed to be a 1980s action throwback. Heck, the film made $72 million in China, where
piracy is considered an even larger problem. If the movie were better or R-rated, or if the first two not-great
Expendables films had been better, I'd argue that Lionsgate and Millennium's
The Expendables 3 would have earned a total closer to the first two films with or without its premature availability.
So where does that leave
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales?
First, let's acknowledge the slightly amusing irony of a
Pirates of the Caribbean movie being victimized by online piracy. And let us also acknowledge the notion of a bunch of online evildoers trying to blackmail Disney, of all studios. I too am imagining a
Godfather-like montage of the responsible parties being bumped off in spectacular fashion concurrently with the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the
Guardians of the Galaxy Disneyland ride.
And let us also note that of all of Walt Disney's 2017 movies,
Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge (as it's called in certain territories) is arguably the least "important" release outside of
Born in China. Yes, it's a sequel to a franchise that has earned $3.73 billion worldwide. But it's clearly on its last legs, it has already screened for the press (hence no surprises about the film's quality) and it's being advertised as the final chapter. Compared with the likes of
Beauty and the Beast and
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it's about as important to Disney's annual bottom line as
Alice Through the Looking Glass was last year.
The only long-term negative effect of the film underperforming (it was last tracking at a $90 million Fri-Mon domestic debut) would be serious discussions about the wisdom of opening the next two
Star Wars movies over Memorial Day weekend. But assuming the hackers make good on their threat, and the files they claim are
Pirates of the Caribbean 5 aren't merely the R-rated director's cut of
Tinker Bell: The Pirate Fairy (would watch) or some long-ass episode of
Jake and the Neverland Pirates (Yo ho, oh no!), how much damage would this really do to the movie?
The answer, I'd argue, is not much.
First of all, their threat to release the movie in twenty-minute increments is beyond stupid, since that means would-be viewers will have to download separate files and watch the film like a 1940's serial (or, perhaps more appropriately, like a Netflix binge). Second, the folks who are going to see
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales aren't exactly the sort of moviegoers who would forsake a theatrical viewing and instead grab a family of four over to the laptop or the desktop computer to watch the movie in 20-minute increments.
Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is going to play to casual moviegoers around the world who like the franchise and wouldn't mind seeing another one as a fun way to kill an afternoon or an evening.
The folks who would watch a pirated copy of
Pirates of the Caribbean 5, especially one doled out in installments, probably weren't going to see it in a theater anyway. That doesn't make it right or ideal, but there really hasn't been a case thus far of a major movie that otherwise would have been a hit suffering from online availability. Remember that guy who got
fined $1.1 million by Fox for pirating The Revenant? Said Leonardo DiCaprio movie made $183m domestic and $532m worldwide, one of the biggest R-rated grossers ever and Dicaprio's third-biggest global hit behind
Inception and
Titanic. While
millions of folks allegedly live-streamed Fate of the Furious on opening weekend, said film still snagged a record-breaking $532m global debut for Universal/Comcast Corp.
Now, for the record, lest you think I'm brushing over the very idea of piracy as no big deal, I will again repeat that it is often fatal for smaller films that depend on every single ticket sale or VOD rental to justify the investment, and that goes for smaller distributors and the major studios. But the big movies that were going to do well prior to piracy-related threats still tend to do well anyway. Nonetheless, if you're someone who wants Hollywood to make fewer IP-driven franchises, you should be annoyed as well. The very fact that a film like
Pirates of the Caribbean 5 can survive online piracy is just part of what encourages studios to make more "safe" offerings of this nature.
Even with an alleged budget of $235 million, I'd wager that Disney can take whatever lost money that might arise from a two-week early online release of
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Precedent is made to be broken, but recent history suggests that the Mouse House can and should tell these cyber criminals to walk the plank.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottm...-pirates-of-the-caribbean-johnny-depp-hackers
