I first noticed this because of Skinmarink. If you haven't heard of it, it's a bizarre experimental horror film that had made waves in the horror community because of its unique qualities, divisive reactions, and some uniquely terrifying scenes. When I first saw people raving about it last fall, I did some reading and was surprised to learn that it had only played at a few festivals at the time. How had so many people seen it?
In the wake of the COVID-19 plague, some film festivals have given people the option of participating digitally. I've done this myself - you pay for access to a small streaming platform where you can watch these movies for a limited time. It turns out some unscrupulous participant recorded the entirety of Skinamarink and gave it to a piracy website. I won't identify it here, but I will note that they cleverly named it after a very popular fictional character which means that searching for it using Google or another engine is not likely to be successful. You need a direct link. When I found one, I learned that this site didn't just host this one film, but thousands of other movies and TV shows. I've seen movie piracy before, but not like that. I doubt this is the only site of its kind and I can say with confidence that this could seriously disrupt the entire movie industry within a few years.
The last movie I can think of that had this sort of word of mouth driven piracy campaign was the excellent Swedish film Let the Right One In, but that was about 15 years ago. While there are some people who will always pirate movies if they have the means, in general the convenience of digital streaming sites lowered the demand for it for a number of years. So what happened? It became less convenient.
As of this writing, I use Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Shudder for my movie streaming activities. Other ones come and go but those are the main ones. There are more platforms than ever before and lately it seems like we're paying the same amount or more for libraries that are shrinking in size. I had HBO Max for a while until some incoming executive took a hatchet to their once impressive library, so I let that one go. Shudder was significantly hobbled last year by a round of layoffs from their parent company and now their continued existence depends on the popular The Last Drive In with Joe Bob Briggs. If that ever goes, they're looking at a potentially fatal exodus of subscribers. As for Netflix, I wouldn't put it past them to only show two episodes of the last season of Stranger Things each year, since they know full well that's the major reason people are sticking around.
The conditions are ripe for a piracy resurgence and advancing technology means that it will be easier than ever for people to watch movies illegally. Gone are the days where you might have to wait a few hours for your computer to download a movie, you'll be able to find it streaming and start watching immediately. Hollywood and the streaming companies will need to do some soul searching if they want to lessen the impact. It worked out okay for Skinamarink, which grossed $1 million in its small theatrical release. Given that it cost $15,000, that's a huge success. When some $200 million superhero movie comes up short because people decided it was easier to just wait until it showed up on some piracy site, that will be a nasty wake up call.
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