It is the thick of the first true summer movie season in three years, and audiences have never had so much choice. Blockbusters (Top Gun: Maverick), superhero epics (Thor: Love and Thunder), kid flicks (Minions: The Rise of Gru), rom-coms (The Lost City): they’re all here! Oh, I don’t mean in theatres. All the titles above – and so many more – are now available online, for free, via piracy sites.
While some services are more user-friendly than others – old-school players like The Pirate Bay require familiarity with BitTorrent technology, while upstarts such as Bflix look and feel like slick streamers, complete with Top 10 lists and handy tags denoting which films are “HD” rips and which are “CAM” copies illicitly recorded during in-cinema screenings – they all represent a large and pervasive threat to anyone who makes and watches movies. Forget the streaming wars: piracy is the battle truly hitting Hollywood.
How much exactly is a matter of debate. As journalist Richard Rushfield’s popular industry newsletter The Ankler put it this past fall, estimates of how badly piracy costs the U.S. economy range from a low of US$29-billion to a possible US$71-billion. But piracy websites, some of which now operate as streamers themselves complete with monthly subscription packages priced to access a mind-boggling array of content, also collect reams of online advertising revenue, which Bloomberg pegs at US$1.3-billion a year.
Read the full article in The Globe and Mail.
