Are you actually trying to imply that having a DVD quality leak come out far before the actual movie even hit theaters isn't going to have any effect on the box office results?
I'm saying that it is demonstrably negligible. For instance before the Casino Royale bond movie made it to cinemas leaks appeared and preemptively the studios made a fuss about this hurting box office figures. Somehow it managed to be the biggest bond release ever.
In fact I would state that the only thing really hurt by leaks are mid level movies that are not good enough to provoke people to go to the cinema.
Further to that I would assert, as others have, that people who often pirate often visit the cinema and would under no circumstances part with money for these mopvies so it economically changes nothing.
That's actually evidence that it could have hurt sales. The biggest bond release ever demonstrably has the most interest ever. The most likely that someone will shell out the cash to see it (as hundreds of millions did). If pirate DVDs got sold, they're more likely than ever to have replaced/supplanted a ticket sale.
Its not fair to say "well they made a lot of money anyway". Its also then true that they lost more money than other movies too.
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I'm saying that it is demonstrably negligible. For instance before the Casino Royale bond movie made it to cinemas leaks appeared and preemptively the studios made a fuss about this hurting box office figures. Somehow it managed to be the biggest bond release ever.
In fact I would state that the only thing really hurt by leaks are mid level movies that are not good enough to provoke people to go to the cinema.
Further to that I would assert, as others have, that people who often pirate often visit the cinema and would under no circumstances part with money for these mopvies so it economically changes nothing.
That's actually evidence that it could have hurt sales. The biggest bond release ever demonstrably has the most interest ever. The most likely that someone will shell out the cash to see it (as hundreds of millions did). If pirate DVDs got sold, they're more likely than ever to have replaced/supplanted a ticket sale.
Its not fair to say "well they made a lot of money anyway". Its also then true that they lost more money than other movies too.
It could also be evidence that people started watching the rip and decided that it was worth going to see in the theater instead.
Your Aristotelian arm chair logic is not how the world works. There is no metric by which it is possible to conceive of something that didn't happen.
Its called revenue estimation, and every business everywhere does it every day.