Ah, remember Michael Lynton? The Sony Pictures CEO who earlier this year insisted that nothing good had come from the internet at all. When everyone started mocking him for this statement, rather than back off, he doubled down and insisted it was true, using examples that were easily debunked. Apparently, he hasn’t learned his lesson. He’s back at it, pushing for the UK (and others) to pass laws kicking people off the internet (so-called “three strikes” laws) while insisting that due to piracy there’s less money to make movies and fewer movies being made. Of course, those are things that can be fact checked, and the folks over at TorrentFreak did exactly that, pointing out that more movies are coming out each year and more money is being made. Oops.
The way Lynton tries to get around this is by not actually talking about how many movies are coming out, but just counting the number of movies that came out of “the leading studios.” I find this quite amusing, because in the podcast we discussed last week involving Paramount’s Scott Martin, part of his argument was that while the big studios were fine, the independents were all suffering and fewer movies were coming out because of it — and, as a “fan” of independent movies, he found that sad. I didn’t bother to check the numbers, but it appears that Martin was simply wrong. More movies are being made, and it looks like an increasing percentage of them are coming from smaller independent shops.
The problem, again, seems to be that the folks at the movie studios (just like those at the record labels) only like to count the big hits as successes — rather than the smaller projects that actually make money and make up the majority of the actual market. It’s the same sort of thinking that makes movie studio people insist that we need to explain to them how they can keep making $200 million movies. That’s the wrong question. The question is how do you make profitable movies. The technology has advanced such that it’s cheaper and cheaper to make movies (which is why we have more of them). But notice that the studios never focus on ways to make movies in a more economical way, but how can they keep spending. Perhaps that’s a bigger problem than “online piracy.”
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