The Oscar winner and generation-defining talent spent three years writing, directing, producing and editing “The Odyssey,” making his movie into its own kind of myth: a hand-crafted spectacle shot across six continents on the most rarefied cameras in the world, powered by the biggest stars and designed to be seen exclusively in movie theaters. But after only eight days of wide release last month, millions of viewers globally watched a pirated version of Matt Damon’s struggle to return to Ithaca on the social platform X. Audio and visual quality was as premium as the site could handle, and pixels on smartphones broadcast Nolan’s labor of love for free before it was yanked over copyright violation.
This is the lawless new universe of piracy. In the ’90s, outlaws in the aisles filmed “Jurassic Park” on camcorders and sold copies on street corners. In the early aughts, “Finding Nemo” was burned onto blank DVDs and hustled all over major markets by the caseload.
These were physical goods dealt in the shadows. Now, the moviegoing public can stumble on perfect replicas of theatrical blockbusters on numerous social apps and screen them in full before copyright teams can hit the panic button. The losses for media companies sit in the high tens of billions of dollars, a number that will climb as technology advances.
This kind of piracy has become a double-edged sword for legacy media companies. To the delight of Hollywood, the “selfie generation,” Gen Z, has unexpectedly packed movie theaters lately — but they’ve brought along their digital habits. Audience members film crucial plot points and wild crowd reactions to show that they were there, and the studios look the other way and call it marketing.
The gargantuan Sony Pictures hit is barreling toward becoming the highest-grossing movie ever in the U.S. It also played for 5.9 million X accounts — on opening day — before the studio shut down the bootleg version. Management consulting firm Kearney and anti-piracy company Muso estimate that piracy costs the industry $75 billion a year, and project it will reach $125 billion by 2028.
With the average movie ticket costing $16, those 5.9 million views of “Brand New Day” on X surely cut into its potential revenue. In other words, Spidey himself can’t stop the astonishing speed with which illegal versions of brand-new tentpole films are appearing online. Studios submit takedown requests to TikTok, Instagram and other social media companies and await responses.
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