On February 10 2017, audiences around the world will be sitting down in cinemas to watch the much anticipated LEGO: Batman movie. 48 days later, Australians can do the same.
Village Roadshow is repeating history, making the same mistake it made with The LEGO Movie. A five million dollar mistake. A mistake co-CEO Graham Burke said the distributor would not be making again.
Everything is not awesome.
@BrickingAround LEGO Batman will be released in Australia on 30th March, 2017.
— Roadshow Films (@RoadshowFilms) December 5, 2016
Piracy of The LEGO Movie cost Village Roadshow “somewhere between $3.5 and $5 million in sales” Burke revealed at a government-led Copyright Forum back in September 2014.
“We made one hell of a mistake with LEGO,” Burke said of the decision to delay The LEGO Movie‘s release in Australia by 54 days.
“We’ll now make all our movies day in date with the US. I know 20th Century Fox are and Universal are too.”
Adding insult to injury both films were created here by Animal Logic, and the CEO Zareh Nalbandian has spoken out about piracy in the past, expressing a wish to teach kids about the impacts of piracy on creators before they become teenagers and stop caring.
So why, two years later, is this happening again? Expect to hear reasons like “school holidays” and “maximising audiences” being floated, but we’ve reached out to Village Roadshow for an official comment.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo
Comments
17 responses to “Village Roadshow Is Shafting LEGO Movie Fans (Again)”
You could also add Roadshow delaying Green Lantern by 7 weeks.
Roadshows catchphase. “We don’t like making money. Download it instead!”
Was about the say the same thing but your version is better.
It’s almost as if that 2014 $5 million figure was a bullshit number pulled from the air.
It must have been. Clearly, piracy wasn’t so bad after all hence why they are repeating this mistake.
< This sums up my feelings about Village Roadshow and Graham.
But they aren’t making the same mistake. It was delayed by 54 days last time. This time around its only delayed 48 days. Clearly they have learned their lesson.
Their analysis probably showed that 90% of pirated copies were downloaded during those last 6 days. People are willing to wait 48 days, but 54 is just a bridge too far.
Hoist the skull and crossbones lads!!! Arrrrrrrr!!!
Fuck you, Village Roadshow. Either I’m stealing it, or I’m just skipping it. Because fuck you.
Everything is awesome… Everything is cool when you pirate a film
I just had a quick look and the release date only coincides with school holidays for two Australian states – Qld and Vic. Is that really the reason?
Maybe (giving them the undeserved benefit of the doubt), they are still keeping to a paradigm where they have a release schedule and as new movies come out they are released at the earliest free slot in the schedule.
I seriously doubt it but if that is the case it only further highlights how obsolete their practices are.
The other underlying assumption which puzzles me… if it’s best practice to delay kids movies til the school holidays, then doesn’t that mean that the movie will face competition from every other kids movie doing the same thing, and thus get smaller market share?
I’m sure they have very well-paid people figuring this out, but to me, the layman, it’s a bit counter-intuitive. Delay by a few months to known (or at least touted) costs, make up those costs with holiday tickets, but lose costs again due to competition?
I think the fact that it’s Batman and Lego positions it to dominate holiday ticket sales. I’m sure some KPMG bean master has the stats.
Yep – we usually take our kids to one movie per school holidays – I remember they didn’t see Toy Story 3 until they got the DVD because they chose Shrek Forever After instead!
Ouch, a dud choice for the parents
slow clap
I… just, wow… how can they be so stupid? Australia is basically known as the pirating capital of the world. What do they think will happen?
I still remember going around to a friends house to watch the first one. I then went to see it again at the movies only because it was so good that it warranted support. Most likely will do the exact same thing for this entry.
It’s pretty typical sadly, they are going to use the school holidays and maximising audiences as the excuse.. Look at the entire boxing day line up.. (Opening dates from IMDB)
– La La Land – 16 December 2016 (USA)
– Red Dog: True Blue – AU Release
– Moana – 23 November 2016 (US)
– Allied – 23 November 2016 (US)
– Why Him? – 21 December 2016 (US)
– Sing – 21 December 2016 (US)
Of these movies, they could be making money RIGHT NOW if they were all worldwide releases..