'Pirates' Hauls in $132M in Record Debut

In this case, piracy helped Hollywood.

The industry as a whole IS hurting. This particular film broke all sorts of records, yes. The industry as a whole is down overall year after year.

I just want to clarify before I get attacked... I'm not saying piracy has anything to do with this. I do blame quality, as well.

All I am saying is that by looking at the numbers, Hollywood IS indeed losing money year over year. And while I cannot say that piracy has affected this, just on a personal level as a filmmaker myself, I think piracy is still a dumb thing to do.

I'll agree with the quality issue, if hollywood made movies I wanted to watch and the local big box theaters would show art and foreign films, they both would be making much more money off of me. This movies counts as one I will pay to go see.

All I am saying is that by looking at the numbers, Hollywood IS indeed losing money year over year. And while I cannot say that piracy has affected this, just on a personal level as a filmmaker myself, I think piracy is still a dumb thing to do.

What numbers are those? Hollywood almost -always- has a record year. Last years numbers looked bad because the previous year looked so good due to The Passion of the Christ which made almost all of it's money off of people who -never- go see movies.

Fully agreed.

Well -- opening weekend performance has never meant anything in terms of "popularity". It really depends on what you mean by popular, anyway.

If you mean -- it had a heck of a lot of good buzz resulting from the exceptional critical and audience reception of the first one -- that's built in popularity. Even though it was deserved in this case it has little to do with the quality of the movie and more to do with the quality of the last movie.

If you mean -- how does it stack up against other movies that have withstood the test of time -- that's lasting popularity and we can't really know that until it's either stood the test of time -- or not. Still, blockbuster movies almost always shoot to the top of the imdb top 250 for a couple of weeks before settling in at their proper position.

But, as Roger Ebert would say: It stacks up very well to other movies in it's genre. Is it better than say -- Princess Bride? I would wager not by a long shot. Still -- it's an above average adventure movie that will stand up to repeat viewings and that means that it's temporary fresh rating is justified.

Even better, simple ticket sales would be a more apples-to-apples.

One should adjust for national population as well... this would move you from apples-to-apples to Braeburns-to-Braeburns :)

Simple ticket sales for 1939's Gone With The Wind were $191M in it's first box-office run. With ticket prices less than $0.36, this means approximate ticket sales of 500M. Since the 1939 population was about 130M, this means a 3.85 ticket-to-citizen ratio.

Compare this to 1977's Star Wars which had a take of $460M domestically with average ticket price of $2.23. That means approximate ticket sales of 200M. The population of the US at the time was ~220M, so that means a .91 ticket-to-citizen ratio.

Using pure ticket numbers, GWtW would show a 2.5-to-1 advantage over SW. Adjusting for population growth, it's closer to 4.25-to-1.

I expect the nit-pickers when it comes to my approximations. Please be kind.

Shoot.. I used inflation-adjusted and non-inflation-adjusted numbers. Rookie mistake.

If anyone else would like to try their hand at better estimations, please be my guest. That said, I stand by my argument that adjusting for national population would provide a closer comparison.