Zombieland Director Hunts Down Pirates on Twitter
This week Zombieland writer/director Rhett Reese stated that illegal downloads on BitTorrent may prevent a sequel of the film from being shot. In addition, the filmmaker attacked several twitter user who claimed to have downloaded the film.
A few days after the news broke Reese is explaining his Twitter actions in a rather lengthy response. Going after pirates on Twitter is not the most sensible thing to do for a director, but Reese attributes his behavior to his emotional state (triggered by MPAA propaganda on 60 minutes).
While Reese should probably not have tweeted anything about the piracy issues in the first place, it is good to see that he followd it up with a detailed explanation. Below is his reply to all the response his tweets generated.
What do you think? Does he have some fair points or is he out of touch with reality?
—
Hi all, since I’m the one who unwittingly started this particular firestorm, here are my thoughts.
My two tweet plea (five if you include my three angry tweets to individuals) began after I read tweet upon tweet for hours, days, weeks, in which people mentioned (or often, bragged) openly about having just watched Zombieland at home for free. I largely shrugged this piracy off as inevitable, but it never felt good to read the tweets. Then I saw the 60 Minutes episode on piracy. And then I read an article about the sheer numbers of downloads of Zombieland in particular. Rightly or wrongly, I felt burned. For the record, I may have been over-dramatic, in my emotional state, in suggesting that downloading could kill Zombieland 2. It could. In our case, the greater hope/expectation is that it won’t. The movie has done very well.
No, I don’t believe that 1 download = 1 lost ticket sale or 1 lost DVD sale. Certainly, there are many people who both contribute to a movie’s legitimate B.O. and also download the movie… including, it turns out, the people I singled out on Twitter. There are also many people who download movies who would never pay to see those same movies in any format regardless. But I do believe that there is a significant, non-trivial population of people who might have (in an ideal world with no piracy) paid to see Zombieland, either in theaters or on DVD, but instead chose to watch it for free, because it was easy and didn’t cost them anything.
No, I don’t subscribe to the Robin Hood argument, which claims that rich, greedy Hollywood studios/actors/writers/etc. have enough $ and don’t need more. Nor do I subscribe to the argument that examines positive correlations between downloads and box office and concludes that popularity in the one (downloads) is somehow causing the popularity in the other (box office). Correlation does not imply causality.
Some might argue that an ideal world *should* allow unlimited piracy of copyrighted material. I disagree. And I agree with the reasoning behind copyright law. Copyright law grants the owner of a copyright a window of time within which he/she can make money off the copyright. I hate to say it, but people making money off art, even a lot of money, is a good thing. It’s America. It’s capitalism. Copyright law is important because it provides financial incentive for artists to set aside other pursuits and devote entire careers to creating and innovating. Movies. Books. Videogames. Songs. These things bring us joy. And joy is worth paying for.
I can only assume that lovers of piracy relish the improvements in copying/distribution technology that make pirating all the easier and gradually improve the quality of what is being pirated… to where a pirated copy will ultimately be indistinguishable in quality from an original. But take this to its logical conclusion, and it isn’t hard to see why everyone should be concerned. Human nature sadly dictates that few people will pay for what they can get for free. In a world where all art is instantly available for nothing, no one will be able to make a living as an artist. Nor will anyone invest any capital in art. So… no more movies. No more videogames. No more albums. TV shows. Etc.
I by no means want to be an anti-piracy crusader, and I’m now going to step away from the debate. I’m not a very political person. On a very basic level, my tweets were just the defensive reactions of an artist who hates seeing people brazenly proclaim that they’re pirating his work.
I really like the genuine debate that has been inspired by this thread. There are obviously different sides of this issue, and different complexities within it. I’ve been called a lot of things in the last week, a number of which have been pretty crazy, and I just wanted to make the most reasoned response I could. Paying for art isn’t the most objectionable thing in the world. In fact, it’s a very beneficial thing.
PS, thanks for weighing in, everyone, especially those who supported my point of view. Suicide Taxi, in particular, makes a TON of sense to me!
SG
I need to write a really really long counter-argument. bbl.
Here we go: http://www.res2216firestar.co.cc/2009/11/response-to-rhett-reese.html
Artists wouldn’t stop making art if you couldn’t make money from doing so. True artists create because they must, not because they can get rich. Let the “professionals” stop making movies, video games, music and TV shows! Then we’ll be left only with people who are passionate about their artwork, I see no downside to this.
Mr. Reese, I’d love to pay you for your movie. Do you have a PayPal account?
Oh, what’s that? You won’t take my money unless it’s from a DVD sale? Okay, your loss.
The copyright point Rhett Reese mentions is right but not completely right, as he forgot to mention a tiny little detail regarding the incentive behind copyright law: the amount of time a copyrighted work is protected.
If, and this is absolutely true, the incentive behind copyright law is for an artist to have a time frame in which he can make more works, then said time frame should be enough to provide income to the artist until he has come up with new works. Of course the length of it could only be expressed as an average. But I believe I am not crazy if I say that the current time frame is way too big.
Given that technology today makes it possible to produce a work in less time than it was required when copyright law was first introduced, it makes absolutely no sense to keep expanding said frame as it has happened (at least under US law) throughout history. Let’s not forget that (at least when copyright law was examined by the US “framers”), the point that was most considered is the people’s welfare. IMHO, I do not believe art resembles some company’s asset, and I don’t believe its business model should resemble that of corporations. Copyright protection should not last forever (as it is currently proposed – btw, saying “forever minus 1 day” is absolutely stupid and the people who propose that should be embarassed).
Making a final point, in my country, artists make only a tiny bit of money from the sales of their works. A CD record which is sold here at $30 (~u$s8) represents the artist only an income of less than one dollar per individual sale. Artists make much more money from concerts than from record sales, and I believe it’s somewhat the same around the world (and even though the movie market operates in a different way, I also believe there are some similarities). Record companies keep the rest, which I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing, but much of the work record companies do is now obsolete given current technology improvements in the last few years. If the objective is to support the artists,
Well, those were my two cents. I hope Mr. Reese reads this lines. I do not have a Twitter account, so if somebody whishes to point him to this post, feel free todo so.
GODLiKE.-
PS: forgive my rusty English, it’s been a while :)
Holy smokes… I think I need to start a blog.
I don’t download movies anymore… but I don’t buy them anymore either. And this is the exactly why… some artists complain about the potential money they lose on every download. I’m tired of seeing these stories.
So even if I wanted to download it, I wouldn’t. But I don’t buy for a second that an artist starves for every torrent file.
I won’t go into details here, because the P2P community has pointed out pretty much all of the facts that support the theory that the huge amount of downloads are far from a bad thing.
If anything, his rampage against ‘pirates’ (who are just ordinary people, by the way) is only going to make some of his fans displeased with him.
It’s also weird that he mentioned how the 60 minutes P2P episode affected him so deeply. I mean what a load of propaganda was that!
PS. His comments about capitalism made me want to take a dump on his doorstep and put a dollar bill on it.
Few points:
o) If there wasn’t for the huge profits in the music/movie industry we would actually have much more quality art. The current “art” is more of a marketing creation than anything else. The sole purpose of most mainstream so called “art” is solely to make money. And that actually destroys creativity, destroys art and destroys genuine passion and expression of artists.
o) “certain time frame” to make money would make kind of sense. But death + 70 years is not a freaking “time frame” it’s 4 generations! It’s ridiculous. Reasonable time frame would be 2 years, 99% of income is made in the first year anyway.
o) Copying for non-commercial purposes should be allowed. People’s nature is a need to share, with family, friends, other human beings with no other incentive than to connect with fellow human. By forbidding this the copyright is asking me to be a bad person. Every time I buy copyrighted music/DVD/anything I promise to be a bad person … I can’t do that and won’t. It’s a matter of moral code. I pay only for free stuff :) I value my freedom and I’m willing to give up worthless paper for it.
o) The argument of human nature is stupid. It’s a matter of culture, if people were not forced to pay for “art” they would pay for it voluntarily because they enjoy it. To claim that the production of art would stop is incredibly uninformed, ignorant and plain ridiculous. This incredible fallacy is best demonstrated on open-source software which enjoys exceptional success. Where did Linux and all those tons of software worth of millions of men-hours came from? And the quality is also much better in many cases that commercial alternatives, this would happen to art too – higher quality. In recent past there was no copyright and the best art pieces come from that time after all so he should think about not listening for the propaganda of the industry.
o) Given these revelations maybe he should think about if it’s not him who is immoral no matter how many similarly uninformed folks are encouraging him (I would suspect from inside the movie industry)
o) I watched first 5 minutes of this “movie” and concluded that it’s total crap. Watching humans eating humans, blood and guts everywhere … disgusting. A waste of bandwidth and processing power consumed by my Bittorrent client ;) If this is his idea of “art” I see why he would be afraid of real artists and real competition not backed by huge industry giants.
o) Also, the movie industry is not paying you for your “art”. It’s paying you for the great service in dehumanizing the population. When people see this blood murdering piece of crap they’re no longer disturbed by pictures of children torn to pieces in Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine … mainstream entertainment was never here to just entertain you, there is a political agenda. And you’re complicit in it, congratulations … enjoy your blood money.
I was thinking if I should post this fact because it’s pretty strong opinion but hell … there are times when silence is treason.
Going to work in the Computer Games industry i can see where people come from when they complain that piracy is a bad thing. But i can also see the pirates come from…
I personally think that there will always be people who will download stuff just because they can get it for free. There will be those that download to trial stuff and pay for it if they think it is worth the money. Finally, those that will pay for anything. The first and last people here are either customers or not, there is normally no changing of their minds here. Its the people on the fence everyone needs to try to get to watch films, buy video games, buy music etc… but with so much commericalised crap out there, this makes the job for those who do sit on the fence much harder. The industries try to make as much money as they can, anyway they can.
People shouldn’t being doing their jobs because it pays well otherwise people would look into being lawyers, high ranking police officers, etc… and not do something that they enjoy.
And Rhett Reese if all you care about is the pirates, and the people downloading the movies where none of the money goes to you, well you are obvisously in the wrong sort of job as this to me seems like all you care about is the money from this.
MeH
Mayhem excites Hell
“a pirated copy will ultimately be indistinguishable in quality from an original.”
IMO pirated copies are BETTER than originals, not in video or sound quality, but portability, size (no physical entities to lose or get scratched), and organization. No Digital Rights Management to prevent me from doing whatever I want with my copy be it share it with a friend (allowing a friend to borrow a dvd isn’t illegal) or put it on my portable video player to keep me occupied on an airplane. Simply put…there is NO comparable market for what the pirate world gives you. And that goes for movies, music, applications, television shows, you name it.
Honestly, I take the response that says artists would paint free and the response that copyright holders have way too big of a window of time to make money and that’s how I feel. If he wants to direct movies then he should direct movies, but understand that his “ideal” world doesn’t exist and that he will take an estimated loss on his profit standards due to his like 5% population estimate that would actually go and pay to see the movie if piracy didn’t exist.
If he wants to make money, then he needs to go do a real job and stop bitching… Go be a greeter at Walmart all I care, just don’t do some hobby and call it a job.
As for the copyright “window”… If an artist can just keep renewing the copyright over and over and over again like some movie franchise owners have done, then it becomes irrelevant that there is even a time frame. When you have movies like Dirty Dancing and games like Fallout that are waaaay too damn old to still be copyrighted, you have to wonder where that line should be drawn. The line that says NO! This is now a public entity and it should be open to everyone as common knowledge, not commercial.
As for capitalism… Oh my god, don’t get me started… There is a reason that we have a near stock market crash every 8-10 years. It’s because it isn’t and never will be a stable solution. If it were, then we wouldn’t be in this global meltdown that we are in…
I think he is out of touch on piracy and why he should be a director but he is on the right path with the people may download and then pay for it later…
Rhett Reese is missing the point: he’s STILL going to make just as much money if not MORE money even with his movie being pirated.
A bitorrent ‘cam’ film is just a “marketing video”, not a complete movie in the real sense because a person views it with the same mentality as in viewing a preview or clip of the movie, and after watching it would be more excited about seeing the ‘real’ movie either on DVD or in the theater on the big screen.
Benefits to film studios of someone watching a movie from bittorrent when it was just released in the theater:
Free advertising on thousands of bittorrent client apps.
Free advertising through word of mouth on the street.
Free advertising online on thousands of blogs, review sites, etc.
Free advertising via news media
The person would advertise it word of mouth to friends and family telling them what a great movie it was and as a result they would then go see it in theater and pay money, thereby producing film revenue where there was none before for the film studio.
The person would be ’sold’ on it and would then be justified to spend money to go buy the DVD when released knowing what to expect, so the film studio would still make money anyway.
The person would then be a fan of the film and then would buy related merchandise, toys, collectables, etc., making money for the film studio.
The person would become part of a fan base and write blogs, post reviews online, producing more interest in the film and causing more people to read the posts, etc, and to go see it in the theater, so the film studio would get free advertising and also make more money.
A good example is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Go to wikipedia and check out its budget ($150 Million) and its gross revenue ($373 Million). Oh, and a sequel is planned as well so Rhett Reese reason of no sequel is unfounded.
Rheet Reese can suck my bawls.. I am never watching his movies ever.. I am gonna go download and watch Ink.. If I like it they will get my 1 dvd sale for the month..
I saw Ink, it’s much better … interesting story and a twist at the end :) Definitely recommended. I’m still not going to support it unless it’s under CC license though as I explained. If they had a donate button I may … I’m going to fire an e-mail to them.
This is what I do not understand. Even some people here act like it was somehow his fundamental right to make money or something. It’s not! 30,000 children die a day because they don’t have anything to eat, where is their right to life? But this guy somehow should have the right to violate our freedoms, take away our right to share with others because … wait for it … he wants fucking money! Screw him, greedy bastard! Of course he is just conditioned to believe it’s normal that way. If you would grow up among savages killing each other every 2 hours you would believe that murder is normal too. He probably never thought about it, just as 99.9% of others.
As to box office revenue I would hope it will get 0! Nothing. Nada! It’s not their freaking right to not go bankrupt. If others fail to adapt to new technologies they are finished and I can’t see why it should be any different for movie industry. They’re dinosaurs and should go extinct as fast and painlessly as possible. They’re just pain in the ass at this point anyway. We should help them and never ever buy copyrighted works and pay artists who respect our freedoms instead. These morons can end up unemployed on the street as far as I care. Millions of Americans with far more important skills are on the street, lost their houses but this guy has “a right to make money” … fuck that!
I can agree with Mr. Reese in some points. But I disagree that piracy could kill new art (as he nicely called it) being made. Actually, I haven’t ever heard of a company going bankrupt, or a sequel being canceled, due to unauthorized sharing. If something is worth downloading, it is worth buying. But that there-is-somebody-out-there-who-could-have-paid-but-didn’t feeling is killing those people on the inside. And there is only one word for that: greed.
If anything his behaviour to the fans has been disgusting to say the least, and is what will cause a lot of fans to turn away now.
His own behaviour will be what kills any sequels, not piracy.
He believed the 60 minutes report? Does that mean that he believes everything he sees? Does he believe his own movie was real then?
If anything studios have slowly come to understand there’s a lot of money to be made from anti-piracy, going after fans who download content online.
Embrace evolution, make new business models.
Just look around you, there’s a huge demand for it!
If the people behind distribution are not up to it, fire them!
They are responsible for the loss of a lot of money for not being able to keep up and LEAD the way things have gone.
Fans obviously want to be able to see this content easily as well as contribute in a lot of ways if they can, people want other people to be able to see these movies and hear music and share it with as many people as possible.
If only they had offered a set amount to be able to access a large library of DRM-free content…
Instead that money now goes to a seedbox and vpn.
Oh well.
Never ever watching Rhett Reese films…. I am going to pirate everyone of his movies and burn hundreads of copies and drop them all over the place.. Or maybe I wont..
funny how some of the best pieces of art in history, real art, not hollywood 20th/21st century marketing but real ART came about when there wasnt much money in it, when there were no copyright protections.
Mr Reese lives in fantasy land if he thinks the only real artists are the ones that mass market their crap to the rest of the world. There are many people that make ‘pure’ art simple for the sake of art. case in point -> there are no product placements in ‘art’.
Seems Mr Reese should have gotten more money from Tide or whatever other products to whom he whored himself out.
I used to goto theater more but I kept getting burned on bad overpriced movies. I cant stand blockbuster and the garbage on the shelf there. The quicker I can download it the quicker i can determine how much its worth. first run theater showing? dollar theater showing? new release rental? old release $1 rental?
Zombieland was definitely worthy of theater viewing and maybe even SHOCK purchase for DVD library (very few movies are worth owning to me. i dig zombie movies tho)… long story short i’m not paying shit to that pretentious douchebag Reese. dont make zombieland 2.
I dont think he is wrong… but i definately know piracy will never cease. It has been in existence since time immemorial. The fact is there are people who cannot afford to buy the dvd and considering it is made available for free on the internet they will download it…then there are those who will never buy the dvd even if they had the money bcuz its not worth it anymore… Anyway some of these movies are making enough money so why go after people sharing it. As 4 me i’ll download movies and if it’s worth it i’ll buy the dvd for extra feature and deleted scenes…Movies like THE DARK KNIGHT are examples of why movies can make enough money even when they are downloaded for free bcuz they are exhilirating…
I agree with him on some points, but he needs to understand that Piracy exists solely because of unfair, or unjust rules/laws.
Think back to the days of the pirates that sailed the seas in ships, read up on that, there is a reason they existed.
What a bunch of entitled douches detached from reality.
Yeah, Reese is just obsessed with money. I’m sure his concern has NOTHING to do with the fact that his chances at making future are hinge on how profitable his previous works happen to be. It couldn’t be THAT at all.
Of course, it, also, can’t be that he and/or the studio have the right to set the price on their product and the consumer has the right to decide it is worth that much money and purchase it or that it isn’t worth the money and go without. Nowhere is stealing it a perfectly valid and moral option, especially since it isn’t essential to you living to draw another breath tomorrow.
You people trying to reference the past cultural methods of art financing really are pretty clueless. Private patrons commissioned art…for their own collections. They didn’t always immediately see the light of day. Many times they only became available for public viewing after the patron passed away and willed his/her collection to a museum or his/her surviving family sold it to one.
Would art exist without such a for-profit industry backing it? Sure. Would you get even half the shit you can’t wait to download the day before it hits theaters or shelves? No fucking way.
Rejoin reality as soon as possible. Some of your friends who learned how to use their brains miss you, I’m sure, and would love for you to join them for a rousing session of intelligent thought.
The biggest problem here is how the problem is framed. Currently, it’s framed as us against them. Pirates vs artists. According to Reese’s argument, artists need to get paid for them to produce their art. Pirates prevent/hinder this from happening. If allowed to continue, piracy will remove all incentive to create art. The problem with his argument is that he needs to check his premises. One of his false premises has been addressed already. Many artists do NOT create art because of an expectation of profit. In fact, it could be argued that the BEST artists would continue to create no matter what. But again, this has been addressed already.
The other main premise that is false is this: While it is true that an artists NEEDS to compensated MONETARILY for the art they create (I don’t think anyone can argue with that), copyright is NOT the only method to ensure that. I completely and wholeheartedly agree that artists who create art that the public enjoys needs and deserves to be compensated for his effort. But, the copyright system has flaws. And while it is very noble to try to shoehorn a compensation method into the framework of capitalism, it’s got issues. Capitalism works because it is SO GOOD at allocating scarce natural resources. There is only so much coal in the world. There are only so many diamonds. There is only so much land. Before the internet, it was pretty easy to fit art into this model. Once a song is recorded, there will be only so many CDs. There will be only so many DVDs. There will be only so many movie theaters, with only so many seats. But, now with the internet, that movie, song, whatever is not scarce anymore. There is an infinite supply of that product. Copyright attempts to ARTIFICIALLY limit the supply through the use of laws. But, as we are currently seeing, Adam Smith’s invisible hands are stronger then any law will ever be. (You are seeing the same thing in the illegal drug industry. They are trying to fight it by artificially limiting supply. You can see how well that’s going…)
So, what’s the answer? What better then the copyright system? I have no idea. But, I do know that it isn’t the ONLY system. The problem is that very little effort is spent trying to find a better system. For example, what if an artist is payed a one time fee for releasing his art to the world. Once it’s released, the world owns it. Is this a better system, probably not. But like I said, there are other ways of doing it. THIS is the discussion that we need to be having. We are wasting everyone’s time arguing over who is right, the artist or the pirate. They are both right. The artist NEEDS to compensated, that the pirate SHOULD be able to download it for free since it is an unlimited resource. What we need to do is come up with a system that compensates the artists for his work without resorting to imaginary concepts like reproduction rights that have absolutely NO BASIS IN REALITY.
One movie I’m not going to see even for free. Rhett Reese may well end up in the “list” with retarded Lars and company.
@mike
About music, a promising and viable business model alternative to the “all rights reserved” one is the “some rights reserved”: contents protected by licenses with “some rights reserved”, like the 6 different Creative Commons licenses. It has been clearly shown, for example by Jamendo, that this business model is sustainable and surely better than classical copyright.
About books, in Italy we have several famous writers who have releasing every and each book under Creative Commons since 15 years, not to mention of course giants like Cory Doctorow and others.
In Europe, about 60% of the artists earn, from royalties, not even the price they pay to the collecting societies to be their members. Year after year the artists’ balance from copyright is not 0, it’s negative.
This is one among several signals that there’s something deeply wrong with copyright.
While it seems to work with music and books, can the “copyleft” business models be extended to movies? This is a tough question, basically because the investements for a movie can often be hugely superior than those required for books and music, but some encouraging signals are coming from that sector too (see for example the VoDo project by Jamie King).
I think that, anyway, a solution must be based on a reduction of copyright terms. Nowadays terms discourage creativity, instead of fostering it. A good balance, in my opinion, would be coherent with swedish PiratPartiet proposals.
Finally, more solutions are drafted in the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge of Barcelona, which may be a source for inspiration. It has been compiled by a hundred of high profile experts and signed by the most relevant NGOs in the world:
http://fcforum.net
Ciao!
Paolo