Hollywood Credits Anti-Piracy Efforts For "Dark Knight" Success

Sam Gustin has learned the REAL reason why The Dark Knight smashed box-office records during its opening weekend: Hollywood's anti-piracy efforts.

Or so Tinseltown would have you believe.

In an L.A. Times article which can only be described as "bizarre" -- in the words of TechDirt's Mike Masnick -- the Motion Picture Association of America anti-piracy team has taken credit for the film's success.

You see, the geniuses at the M.P.A.A. realized that the film's "core audience of superhero geeks is the same group of young men who gravitate to online file-sharing communities."

So, faster than a speeding bullet, the industry's crack squad of crime fighters went into action, implementing the following strategy:

Warner Bros. created a "chain of custody" to track who had access to the film at any moment. It varied the shipping and delivery methods, staggering the delivery of film reels, so the entire movie wouldn't arrive at multiplexes in one shipment, in order to reduce risk of an entire copy being lost or stolen. It conducted spot checks of hundreds of theaters domestically and abroad, to ensure that illegal camcording wasn't taking place. It even handed out night-vision goggles to exhibitors in Australia, where the film opened two days before its U.S. launch, to scan the audience for the telltale infrared signal of a camcorder. (Emphasis mine)

Reading the above paragraph, I couldn't help but think of Occam's Razor, the oft-quoted axiom which holds that, "All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best."

As in, maybe the The Dark Knight was a smash hit because it got fantastic advance reviews, had little competition, and benefited from months of buzz surrounding the untimely death of Heath Ledger, whose performance was heralded as Oscar-worthy.

And besides, almost immediately after the film opened, it could be obtained online -- if you knew where to look.

It's important to remember that Hollywood's anti-piracy campaign is as much about propaganda as it is about enforcement. If the industry can make you believe that there is a team of crime-fighters, armed with night-vision goggles, fanning out across the globe -- and tracking activity online -- to thwart illegal file-sharers, maybe people will be less likely to traffic in illicit copies of films.

But don't be fooled. What The Dark Night's success showed is that people will flock to theaters to see a good, old-fashioned, summer blockbuster.