This weekend Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is the obvious winner, and I am looking forward to seeing it on the big screen. Extortionist hackers claimed they stole a copy of it and threatened Disney Studios that they would release it online if they were not paid a ton of money, but I can’t see the company paying for a number of reasons. First is it would set a precedent that would encourage hackers everywhere to attack movie studios, not a result I expect the movie industry wants to encourage. Second, you might have noticed an order of magnitude difference between IMAX and regular movies, and another order of magnitude between regular movie screens and your TV set at home. Is a low resolution illegal-but-free version going to keep the audience away from the theaters? I won’t know what the numbers might be unless they carry their threat out, but my own guestimate would be somewhere in the one half to two percent range. While that will objectively be some noticeable amount of money, again I suspect it will be a lot less than the movie studios would lose if they encouraged this kind of activity by paying up. However those details work out, I intend to be in the theater for this film, I have been waiting too long for it to see it on a tiny screen!
