Box Office Piracy

So Pirates 2 absolutely pillaged, plundered, and looted the box office, grossing $132 million - in its opening weekend! Who says people don't go to the movies anymore? That's a new record folks; yes, Pirates 2 has swash-buckled Spider-Man.

Pirates 2 is one of those movies with universal appeal - kids accompanying their parents to see some pirate action, teenage girls going to see Orlando Bloom and guys going to check out Kiera Knightley. The first flick was a phenomenal success, and so it shouldn't really come as a surprise that this film did so well.

It'll be interesting to see what the drop-off in revenues is over the second weekend - that will be the most accurate guage of its staying power. I suspect that although Pirates 2 must no doubt be very entertaining, most people wouldn't watch it a second or third time. And so I don't think this film has a chance at matching Titanic's box office record.

I suspect the fate of Pirates 2 will be similar to another recent sequel, Spider-Man 2, which, with a domestic box office gross of $373 million, ranks 9th all-time. The Spider-Man sequel grossed $115 million over its Independence Day long weekend release, but the drop-off in revenues over subsequent weeks was significant. It made $45 million the following weekend and was dethroned by I, Robot (no joke) on its third weekend, when grossing just $24 million.

Contrast this with the all-time box office champion, Titanic. Titanic "only" grossed $28 million in its opening December 1997 weekend, but it consistently romped the box office charts, remaining at #1 even into April! Remarkably, Titanic continued to gross $20-30 million two months into its release - a testament to positive word of mouth. Undoubtedly, Titanic was kept afloat by legions of preteen and teenage girls going to see Leonardo Dicaprio for a fourth, fifth, sixth time. (I was schooling with some of them at the time.) As I recall, it was a cultural phenomenon.

It's hard to imagine whether any film will surpass Titanic's colossal $600 million box-office gross. It's been nearly 10 years, and no other film has come close. Titanic was released at a fortunate time, when the Internet was still very much in its infancy and DVD players had yet to come about. It's hard to imagine whether in today's fragmentented e-universe of Tivos and Torrents and rampant DVD piracy, a film will amass a box-office gross of such titanic proportions.