We’re now in the throes of Oscar season, where much film discussion and criticism has further narrowed into an intense will they/won’t they focus on a handful of titles. Some will win and be the recipients of new critical and commercial attention. The rest will lose and become an experiment in how far the word “nominated” can get you in marketing. All the while, conversations by internet pirates will help form the opinion of a large segment of movie viewers.
In the months leading up to the Oscars there is potential for a highly-nominated critical darling to catch momentum and make a tidy box-office run. But while they stand on strong critical ground, these films often lack something that is an essential component of a successful feature – web-based buzz in the form of conversations between real people.
Right now these films are only being shown on as few as one-tenth of the screens of the average wide release, which means they’re in a state of critical over-examination but are under-discussed in terms of word-of-mouth. This is not the ideal formula for box-office gains. But in our continuing look at online word-of-mouth across the entertainment industry we’ve noticed a somewhat counterintuitive trend that serves to increase online buzz – the social effect of piracy and file sharing.
As a result of the awards voting process, high-quality copies of films in contention are often available on the internet in the early stages of their release. This results in a level of online word-of-mouth that greatly exceeds expectations of the traditional model, where buzz comes first from the introduction of marketing assets but mostly from an impending release and user reviews. Ten thousand people downloading a film is a significant number when said film only appears on a dozen screens, and these pirates are already plugged into the online communities where some of the deepest and most influential conversations about entertainment properties happen.
Looking at TorrentFreak.com, a website that tracks some of the major trends in piracy, shows how widely awards films are being pirated in relationship to other more mainstream fare. The week of January 4th, The Wrestler was more popular than several other films that had much wider release. Several weeks later, The Reader did the same.
Internet piracy has certainly damaged our media environment, but looking at the smaller reverberations of its changes offers new ways of understanding how people discuss and interact with media. Through understanding this uniquely web-based phenomena, we can deliver superior intelligence about media consumers.