Future of Media Summit Blog

On Sunday evening, in a taxi back to my flat after an exhausting day trip to Melbourne, I had a great idea: I'd invite my friend Nicola to join me at the movies on Tuesday evening - where we could get the "nice" seats for the "cheap" price - to see the recently released and universally acclaimed Disney/Pixar film Wall-E. I called Nic - she immediately agreed it was a great idea - and we set our plans in stone.

The next morning I went over to the site for the Hoyts Cinemas in the Entertainment Quarter of Fox Studios, and scanned around, looking for Wall-E on the list of currently playing films.

Nothing.

I thought, hmm, that's odd. Perhaps it's playing at Bondi Junction?

Nope.

Well, surely it's at George St.?

Nada.

It turns out that Disney has decided to withhold release of Wall-E until the Thursday, 11th of September.

Why is this? This is what I can not get my head around. I have tried to run the maths - perhaps they feel that releasing a children's film at some time other than school holidays would bring them better box office? Perhaps they think that leaving a 2 month window between theatrical release and its inevitable Christmas DVD release will somehow not cannibalize ticket sales?

Or, more likely, they just weren't thinking. These international release plans were drafted by the studios a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away... That being before teh Intarwebs became the primary distribution vehicle not just for films themselves, but for news about films. I was reading rapturous reviews of Wall-E in the New York Times, Deadline Hollywood, CNN, and half a dozen other blogs, from the weekend of its release. There is no territoriality on news, and hasn't been since 1995: just because the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age haven't written up a nice review, just because Margaret and David haven't given it four-and-a-half stars, doesn't mean that Australians aren't perfectly aware of this film.

Rather more significantly, the film is also perfectly available to Australians - if illegally. From a few hours after its wide release, Wall-E has been available through BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova. These torrents are well-seeded, so anyone with decent broadband could have their own copy (admittedly, without much of the high-resolution glory of Pixar's work) within just a few hours.

Disney is stuck in an old way of thinking that has been entirely obsolesced by a new mode of distribution. It could well be that interest in Wall-E will simply override the concerns of a tut-tutting media marketplace which (it is widely believed) simply shakes down Australians for their entertainment dollars, and screws them out of day-and-date releases in the bargain.

This phenomenon is becoming rarer. Iron Man opened globally; as did Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; just a week ago, so did Hancock. Studios, just like television broadcasters, fight against piracy by making their products globally and instantaneously available. This doesn't destroy piracy - nothing can effectively do that - but it does mean that the studios have the opportunity to earn back their production costs + 10% (their goal, as always) before the market becomes saturated with pirated versions.

So, I ask again, what's holding Disney back? Surely Steve Jobs - who sits on Disney's board, having bought his way in with his Pixar shares - must understand the futility of artificially limiting access to content that the audience wants. The audience always gets what it wants, by any means necessary: that's the new rule. So where was the failure? Does Disney assume that, because Wall-E is a children's film, it is somehow exempt from piracy? Even if an eight-year-old can't master BitTorrent, their twelve year-old sibling certainly can, and I'm sure that many of them throughout Australia are busily doing what they can to make their younger brother or sister very happy, with a freshly burned copy of Wall-E ready for playing on the family's home theatre system.

This is the risk Disney takes when it uses old-fashioned business models in a thoroughly modern world. They may squeak by this time, and perhaps the next, but one day - and for the rest of time - that tactic will fail them. They'll lose their market window, because they misunderstood the audience.