With five weeks to go until the Academy hands out its golden statuettes, only two of the 36 films nominated have not been leaked in DVD quality online. 34 of the 36 are available for illegal download or streaming, many of which are currently playing in cinemas or have yet to be released in Ireland.
Only the Irish Oscar hopeful Song of the Sea, nominated in the ‘Best Animated Feature’ category, and ‘Best Song’ nominee Glen Campbell: I’ll be Me are not available online.
Over the past decade, as more and more studios send DVD copies of nominated movies to Academy voters in an effort to get them to actually see the movie, the amount of Oscar-nominated movie files online that seemingly fell off the back of a lorry has increased year on year. But the sheer volume of movies freely available this year – combined with the Sony hack release – makes 2015 a tipping point in the public’s regard to online piracy.
While the studios are calling it a disaster, TorrentFreak, an online database of boot-legged files, has described it as “unprecedented.” Giant tent-pole blockbusters of the winter release schedule, The Hobbit and Hunger Games Mockingjay, have been torrented more than a million times each.
It’s a problem that Hollywood is at pains to address, and which it is failing to make any inroad into. Adding watermarks to screener DVDs has helped authorities trace back the source of leaks to several individuals, but the movie pirates are no fools – when The Hobbit leaked late in 2014, the group responsible for sharing it simultaneously wiped away all the evidence leading back to them.
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The problem, ultimately, appears to be distribution, with streaming sites like Netflix the best chance to buck the trend; all over the world, when legal and affordable services like Netflix and Spotify are introduced to new markets, the rate of piracy has been proven to consistently fall. In Norway, Netflix’s arrival saw piracy plummet by more than half.
That said, Netflix isn’t without its own look-the-other-way problems, with the site threatening to clamp down on users who change their Internet settings to stream content à la carte from its different regions. Meanwhile Spotify has seen the high-profile withdrawal of pop star Taylor Swift, who claims the music giant’s remuneration to her was cutting her considerably short. While haters may hate, Taylor won’t wait.
Perhaps the most telling evidence that the current system has become skewered comes in the form of Best Foreign Language nominee Leviathan. The production team behind the Russian movie has added a 'tip jar' to its website, asking anyone who pirated the movie and wants to contribute to donate online. To date, more than ₽320,000 (€267,000) have been crowdsourced from an audience who watched it for free.
To put those numbers into context, that’s almost €100,000 more than the film grossed in the US.
The fact of the matter remains, whatever model of film distribution we settle on, a change is needed. We don’t consume media in the same ways we used to – and with everyday use of social media, we want to be included in the conversation as soon as possible.
Unless movie studios and cinemas can react to meet the expectations and demands of their shifting audience, they might quickly find out that a paying audience no longer exists.
