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Please do name drop. In this case I would consider it a matter of citing your work, and gives me the opportunity to support the projects mentioned if I think th

• anigbrowl 12y ago
  Well, in that spirit look at the popularity on torrent trackers of the Master and Inherent Vice, both directed by PT Anderson, and compare with their box office performance at boxofficemojo.com (plus the wikipedia entries on the films have some additional information about budgets). I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers. Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.