you make it sound that it's a privilege to go watch a movie. If you really must know what kills it for the general joe, it's your rights management .
Watching a movie is a luxury, absolutely. Smart people expense for that. Movies are consumables. Once they are seen, they can no longer be monetized. It is the same as a dinner out at a restaurant. You can't eat and skip out on the tab even if you really liked the meal and may come back in the future. When 95% of the clientele is doing that, they won't be open long enough to see anyone return. Plus, it was too easy to skip out the first time, so you might as well keep doing it.
Rentals exist because you are sampling something you haven't seen. The biggest flaw in the system right now is this: let everyone watch the first 15 minutes for free. Right on iTunes, etc. I have no problem letting the content speak for itself... The issue is just that people don't go back and pay after they torrent a movie they like. A few may buy the DVD, but 10x that amount will download perfect DVD ISO files instead. There's even a dozen versions of printable artwork people have made for my movie's ripped DVDs. Meanwhile, the damn BluRay is $13 (DVD is $9) and has 4 hours of special features that I personally spent AN ENTIRE YEAR of my life making. Just the special features, unpaid, in my house, editing, color correcting, sound mixing... All by myself. I made a whole $2,000 on that whole movie, spread out over 3 years of quarterly checks. That's about the cost of just my Adobe CC subscription. I worked on that movie for about 2 1/2 years total. It has been pirated at least 250,000 times.
My wife and I are 31 and don't have health insurance. We live in a rented house. We've been trying to save up to have a child for FIVE years.
This is who piracy hurts. It is not YOUR privelage to take my art just as I am not entitled to you paying for my art. But if you don't think that a quarter million people stealing it doesn't hurt, down to the core, you are wrong. It feels insurmountable to fight against a tide that strong. It would hurt less to have the movie fade into obscurity, unseen. Because then you just didn't connect with an audience and you can work to connect on the next movie. But when you have a movie that does connect, that wins awards all over the world, but then gets pirated to death... That's really tough... Because even a minuscule budget like $100,000 seems impossible to recoup. So why even bother?
I've mostly moved away from filmmaking to focus on what I get paid to do... Food photography. I love making movies, I really do, but every minute I'm making one is a minute I'm not photographing a meatloaf... And the meatloaf pays the bills.
If you'd actually read my earlier posts, you'd have read that we released our first movie DRM-free, but piracy increased. We released our second movie worldwide via a Creative Commons license for all to share and I got banned from piracy Reddits (where I was asking for help to create torrents for the movie). I got banned from Pirate Bay. I got banned from Kickass.
I stripped away ALL rights from that second movie and pirates spoke loud and clear. My accounts were banned because the content was NOT pirated, but instead, freely available. I'm done listening to excuses. We've changed everything we do to appease pirates and they keep finding new excuses.
(probably only condoling to 'fair use') but anyway.
