Digital piracy often has a bad reputation. Perhaps it is because of memories of those old days. Pre-roll ads with the slogan “You wouldn’t steal a car” that were a fixture in movie theaters. Maybe it’s the word “piracy.” But recent research suggests that illegally uploading, downloading, and sharing movies isn’t necessarily a hindrance to a given title’s bottom line. One study found that the word of mouth generated by illegal movie sharing It can actually increase box office revenueAnd for moviegoers who can’t access (either economically or geographically) independent or arthouse cinemas, piracy can prove essential, or at least a necessary evil. As Andy Chatterley, CEO of research firm Muso, told WIRED earlier this year: “The thing about piracy is that it’s really just people wanting to consume content. They’re not doing it for the act of pirating; they’re driven by marketing for other things that drive legal consumption.”
Smaller films like Red rooms Media outlets often find an audience in such shadowy circles. Lucas Tavares, 23, lives in a small town in Brazil. He obsessively follows film coverage on social media platforms such as X and Letterboxd. Red rooms He first noticed it over a year ago, when it premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. A few weeks later, he was able to get a copy online. “Where I live,” he says, “it’s very difficult to see smaller films and independent films, especially if they’re not American blockbusters. So I rely heavily on torrents.”
For Henry Meeks, a 29-year-old schoolteacher in Philadelphia, torrents and online piracy channels became essential during Covid-19 lockdowns. With theaters closed and film production all but halted, many cinephiles took the opportunity to dig deeper into older, harder-to-find films. “What I love about piracy,” Meeks says, “is that there are tons of movies that have gone out of print. There are no Blu-rays. So it’s a really good archival practice. The stuff that I can’t really find anywhere, even if I wanted to buy it, lives on on those websites.”
When Meeks heard some rumors about Red roomsHe downloaded it and immediately shared it with his friends on Plex: the free media streaming service that lets users amass and share private media collections. This curation sets private servers like Plex apart from the larger, more earth-shattering streaming services with their algorithmic recommendation systems. “Netflix and Amazon Prime have more movies than you could ever watch,” Meeks says. “But they’re not actually curated by a human.”
Plante seems a bit ambivalent about his film’s online success. While he accepts the leak of his film, he notes that generating this kind of word-of-mouth publicity was not at all a “strategy.” He says the film’s French-Canadian distributor insisted on leaving word-of-mouth publicity aside. ‘Red Rooms’ on Canadian video-on-demand services shortly after its theatrical release. “I told him the day after it’s on iTunes in Canada, it’s going to be on PirateBay,” he says, referring to the popular BitTorrent client.
Of course, not everyone has the ability or inclination to download MP4 or AVI files of relatively unknown French-Canadian cyber-thrillers. Plante is confident that the film’s upcoming wide release in U.S. theaters on Sept. 6 will help broaden his film’s cult appeal. Smaller films like this typically have a long life, moving through the international film festival circuit to wider bookings in theaters and on home video. Peer-to-peer file-sharing websites on the gray web are just one of the places people can find the film.
Still, Plante finds it entirely appropriate that his film about the dark side of the Internet has found an audience among people who wade into those same waters. “It’s a very online, very geeky film,” he says. “Of course people will torrent it.”