HomeWeekly News Roundup (24 August 2014)
Welcome to another edition of the WNR. We have some good stuff in here, including a look at why movies flop, how to prevent piracy from happening, all the video game stuff from NPD to more Wii U misery, and my favourite, a look at if the original un-altered non-special edition original Star Wars trilogy films might be heading to Blu-ray soon.
Let’s get started!
The Expendables 3 does badly at the box office. One ‘Expendables’ movie too many, too much competition due to other blockbusters, or pre-release piracy to blame?
What makes a movie flop? More specifically, what made ‘The Expendables 3’ a box office turd (relatively speaking)? According to the distributors of the film, Lionsgate, it was the pre-release piracy of the film that was ultimately responsible, and they’re even suing 10 individuals accused of downloading and sharing the movie. But maybe there are more tangible and more traditional reasons why movies like ‘The Expendables 3’ flops.
As one executive pointed out when asked about ‘The Expendables 3’ failure, if pre-release piracy does have an effect on box office results, it’s less likely to do with the actual download (or the number of people who downloaded it, and however many out of these people that will then not pay for a movie ticket), and more to do with the word-of-mouth effect.
Imagine, if someone downloaded a crappy pre-release version of a very cinematic movie like Gravity, really liked it and told their friends. Most of them will most likely go and pay to see the movie at the cinema rather than download the same crappy copy themselves. Even the original downloader, if he/she really liked the film, might pay to see it on the big screen properly. In this case, pre-release piracy probably doesn’t hurt the movie as much (but probably doesn’t help as much either, since positive word of mouth would have happened regardless of whether people downloaded it or watched it in the cinema and then told their friends about it).
But if the movie was crap, like say, oh I don’t know, the third movie released in four years, in a series that’s beginning to lose its novelty value, then perhaps word of mouth will only discourage others to pay for the movie, and instead, to download a pirated copy to sate their curiosity. In this case, the box office revenue would be negatively affected. But isn’t more the case of recycled movie ideas and badly made movies not getting the punishment at the box office that they deserved, because people were not more adequately informed of the movie’s said poor quality in the first place? If piracy does have this kind of effect, isn’t this a good thing for the industry, and for moviegoers, to force studios to be more competitive and to be more creative in coming up with the kind of movies that we, their customers, actually want? Hmm …
This is why financial losses due to pre-release piracy is hard to calculate. There are just too many reasons why a movie might flop, like competition (“Guardians of the Galaxy” and “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, for example), the aforementioned franchise-fatigue, bad reviews, poor marketing, or even a misleading trailer, might all be reasons for the flop. Blaming piracy is easy though. Too easy!
One show that won’t be blaming piracy, mainly because almost no one is pirating it, is John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight news satire show. And there’s a very good reason why people don’t pirate it – it’s available on YouTube, even here in Australia, for free! Australia’s Gizmodo says, and I fully agree, that because of this, the show and its distributors, HBO, should be applauded for making content so easy to access, and the growing popularity of the show means HBO won’t be losing much in the process anyway.
Will we ever see the original unmodified Star Wars trilogy on Blu-ray?
Speaking of HBO, the premium cable channel may soon look towards Netflix for inspiration, as its HBO Go app may soon add other network’s shows to its original programming (kind of what Netflix has done, but in reverse). Unfortunately with HBO Go still tethered to a traditional HBO cable package, any real talk of being in competition with Netflix is still far too premature.
Possibly the most exciting news for me this week is that the original cuts of Star Wars may be heading to Blu-ray! Den of Geek looks at the evidence and tries to see if the rumours may have something to them. It’s a fairly long read, but with George Lucas having sold Lucasfilm to Disney, with the new Star Wars movie going for the look of the original trilogy rather than the CGI based prequels (thank goodness), and of course the clamour for a new 4K version of the film, there might be just enough there to suggest the original trilogy might just make its Blu-ray debut sooner rather than later. Fingers crossed!
The July NPD results showed that the PS4 was yet again the top selling console in the key U.S. market, for the seventh straight month. Despite the Xbox One price drop and the continued strength of Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U, the PS4 accounted for more than half of all hardware and game sales for next-gen consoles. The margin between PlayStation and Xbox appears to be growing bigger as well, with the PS4 and PS3 combined beating the Xbox One and Xbox 360 combined for the second straight month. Even Sony is finding it hard to figure out why so many people are buying the PS4, to the point where it has them worried.
Sony “worried” about the success of the PS4, and where future sales will come from
Not knowing why your console is a success can be just as “terrifying”, according to Sony, as not knowing why it is a failure (yeah, but tell that to Nintendo!). It makes planning for the future much harder, they say, and Sony are worried about exhausting all the sales derived from “core gamers” and don’t know where future sales might possibly come from.
But it’s still a nice problem to have, at least compared to Nintendo’s. Nintendo’s hopes of turning the Wii U into a more “hardcore gaming” friendly console does not seem to have worked, with Ubisoft this week announcing that they will stop releasing “mature’ games on the Wii U. So games from the ‘Assassin’s Creed’, ‘Far Cry’ and ‘Ghost Recon’ series will no longer feature on the Wii U, despite being available on the PS4 and Xbox One. Ubisoft says that there just aren’t enough sales of these types of games on the Wii U to justify making more of them, and the company will concentrate on family games like ‘Just Dance’.
In a similar announcement, Capcom says the Wii U will not be getting a new Street Fighter game that the other next-gen consoles will be getting. It’s kind of sad really. My first home console version of Street Fighter was on the SNES, which at that time, was every hardcore gamer’s preferred console. But Nintendo’s policy of having “no blood” in their games was already a sign of things to come, with Sega, and then Sony (and eventually Microsoft), having no qualms about violence in video games. It’s ironic that Nintendo is now trying to entice publishers to make these kind of games, and finding it quite difficult indeed.
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And with those last few words, we reach the 1,000 words count, which feels like a good time to stop. See you next week!