Is Illegally Downloading Movies Really That Bad?

Earlier this week, the British government announced that after years of trying to make it work, they were finally giving up what was already a losing battle. From 2015, it will no longer be illegal to file-share in the UK, to the fears of the entertainment industry.

Instead, certain internet providers will email their customers just four warning letters per year informing them at how their killing the industry, to which they’ll probably reply with a shrug and will continue to download the latest episode of Game of Thrones without a second thought.

As we step into this brave new world, along comes The Expendables 3, which has made headlines by leaking (in full DVD quality no less) onto the internet three weeks before its worldwide cinema release. As I write an amateur review blog (trust me, it’s very amateur) I thought it would be interesting to download it, watch it and review it.

My feeling at the time was that I work at a cinema anyway, so I felt a false sense of entitlement that it wouldn’t matter- I wouldn’t be paying to see it due to seeing movies for free. Obviously, the people of Twitter didn’t think that way, and I woke up on Tuesday morning to find out that I’d understandably pissed off a sizable portion of the independent film industry.

How I Briefly Became An Illegal Downloader

It is notable that none of the people fully read my “review” (as one critic from an obscure radio station dubbed it) and as I promptly deleted it, assumed via some tweets I was a person who lives solely to steal from the entertainment industry. In fact, most of my writing was just apologizing for having stolen this one time, purely out of a guilty conscience and that it would work in my favour if this were ever to go to court (yes, I really thought that- proof that I don’t have the stamina to be a full time pirate).

It also should be pointed out, I was far from the only person to download it; reports state that 200,000 people downloaded it when it was uploaded online last Wednesday, but I assume the majority of those people were smart enough not to post reviews of the thing on social media. It’s not like the uploading of the film was a secret; I only downloaded due to every news outlet posting it as a story, advertising that you could easily obtain the film for free, instead of just ignoring it and therefore keeping me away from any torrent sites.

What initially confused me was why were independent filmmakers bothered about the pirating of a big-budget, all star blockbuster, which is still very likely to be a box office hit anyway? Why were they specifically angry at my review, which I’d posted three days earlier on an obscure corner of the internet?

After initially retweeting a Swedish production company calling me “a f*cking douche”, the official Twitter page for indie horror movie Camp Dread told me that even though I’m only a one-time downloader, and that they obviously have no involvement in The Expendables, every time a film is pirated it affects them, as they have been and will be downloaded illegally again.

A recent article for Indiewire by Ruth Vitale and Tim League explicitly stated that even despite the higher profile of films like the latest Stallone action monstrosity, it will be indie filmmakers who are harmed the most.

 “The fact is: pirate sites don’t discriminate based on a movie’s budget. As long as they can generate revenue from advertising and credit card payments—while giving away your stolen content for free—pirate site operators have little reason to care if a film starts with an investment of $10,000 or $200 million.”

How The Movie Industry Can Fight Back

One of the reasons I believe film fans could be drawn to illegal downloading is due to the rather annoying matter of international distribution dates. For example, The Expendables 3 will be released in all territories within weeks of it’s US opening, and audiences will still go see it as opposed to downloading it because of the promise of the full cinema experience (this entire torrenting debacle will have blown over by then).

Mid-budget indie films such as James Gray‘s The Immigrant and Bong-Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, both distributed by The Weinstein Company, don’t even have UK release dates yet, and both have been available internationally for so long that it is increasingly hard to suppress the urge to watch them in this manner. Thankfully, The Immigrant has recently been made available on US Netflix, although Darius Khondji’s cinematography doesn’t look as impressive on a computer screen as it would at the cinema – I may be paying for Netflix, and yet as a film fan I still would happily pay for the best viewing experience possible.

One of my favourite films of last year, The Spectacular Now, also hasn’t received a UK release; instead I saw the entire thing on YouTube, where it had been uploaded in its entirety for free- by the time I watched it, it had already received 60,000 views. This proves that the film clearly has a built-in audience, and one that would better served if they had an actual opportunity to see the film at the cinema, or at least via an avenue where the filmmakers could make money from having their movies seen.

What Can Be Learned From Expendable-Gate?

The lesson I learned from this is actually one I knew before downloading; no matter how terrible they are (believe me, I only watched The Expendables 3 to see just how bad it was) it does a disservice to all filmmakers to watch their movies in ways they weren’t intended to be seen. I wasn’t entitled to write a review of the movie- after all, it’s like a rat criticizing the food he steals from a kitchen, how can you complain if its free?

Although small filmmakers have difficulty getting their movies into cinemas, companies like The Weinsteins and A24 (who distributed The Spectacular Now) have enough industry clout to get their films to international audiences, who are having a hard time suppressing the urge to download their content – if they actually bothered to distribute their films I imagine it would help curb this problem significantly.

The big question here is, have you ever downloaded movies? And how did the experience compare with the real thing?

(top image source: Lionsgate)