May is a month of potential and doubt. Named after Maia, the
Roman goddess of growth, the month can suggest the coming of new
and better things just as plants that sprout in April usually
flower about now. However, the Romans also married Maia off to
Mars, the god of war, and so the month can also stand for somber
ceremonies honoring the dead.
Even the modern English use of the word “may”
reflects this dichotomy, creating a sense of possibility that can
be good or bad, depending on the context. For example, Tom Hanks
may be perfect as Robert Langdon in “The Da Vinci
Code,” but his hair may look worse than Donald
Trump’s.
It’s perfectly fitting, then, that the first week of this
May has brought out both the best and worst of times for Hollywood
studios. Solstices aside, the end of April always marks the start
of summer at the movies, when studio executives can finally relax
for a few months while watching the box-office dollars roll in. The
next four weeks will see the releases of “Mission: Impossible
III” (May 5), “Poseidon” (May 12), “The Da
Vinci Code” (May 19) and “X-Men: The Last Stand”
(May 26), exactly the sort of action-adventure fare that defines
contemporary American cinema.
However, the doubtful side is always more fun, especially when
it comes to an institution as monolithic as the film industry. On
Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about a study
commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America that
concludes the film industry loses $6.1 billion annually to piracy.
To add insult to injury, the country responsible for the most
losses isn’t located in Asia; the U.S. costs the film
industry an estimated $1.3 billion alone every year.
In an effort to make itself seem more adept at its job, the MPAA
quickly blamed college students for the deficit, sending letters to
the presidents of 40 universities asking them to take action to
stop piracy on college campuses. UCLA did not receive such a
letter, but the effect is the same, revealing that the MPAA is more
out of touch with reality than the one guy who complains about the
midnight yell because he has a final the next morning and needs to
study.
It’s alarmingly easy for media corporations to blame
college students for piracy mainly because they know nothing about
it. The incredibly unrealistic way in which that girl downloads a
movie just by clicking a button that says “Download” in
the commercial that used to play in theaters before previews shows
how little the MPAA actually knows about the issue. It’s
nowhere near that easy to download a movie on the Internet (not
that I would know).
Additionally, that commercial presents piracy as a moral issue,
which it definitely isn’t for college students. It’s
one thing to blame college students, but it’s quite another
to blame them for entirely the wrong reason. As long as downloading
is free, but movie ticket prices and DVD prices continue to rise
exponentially, poor college students will continue to download
movies. It’s as simple as that. Why pay upward of $10 and
help pay Tom Cruise’s salary by seeing “Mission:
Impossible III” in theaters when you can see it for free a
few days later?
I say this, for the record, as one of the biggest supporters of
seeing movies in theaters. I fully believe it adds an element that
can never be recreated, no matter how sophisticated home theaters
get. Still, I can’t blame students for making economic
decisions; theaters are worth the outrageous prices to me, but I
know I take movies way too seriously.
Instead of whining about all the money it lost, the MPAA could
take much more constructive steps to end mass piracy by actually
coming up with an economics-based plan to stop it. I’m not
convinced the majority of pirates are college students, but if they
are, the movie industry needs to offer students more incentives to
go to the movies or buy licensed DVDs.
If consumers stop buying a product, you don’t whine about
their lack of morals. You make the product more appealing. Clearly
the industry is not going to start making better movies, so it has
to make those movies more appealing. Offering students a more
enticing discount on tickets and DVDs could be a start, as could
charging a small (less than $5, if that) fee to download movies
legally at high quality. If iTunes can work, iFilms could too.
The question is still how the MPAA could be so out of touch with
reality. Maybe its members just see too many movies.