When oh when are the people involved in fighting film piracy going to realise that the biggest blow they could commit to these illegal downloaders would be to stop the cinemas ripping their customers off.
I recently took my children to a film and it cost me £10 for my ticket and £7 for each child then add in the popcorn and drinks at extortionate prices and the total --- £60.

Yes that is what I said £60 for 1 adult 3 children.

It is a disgusting rip off.

I dont condone film piracy but when I see the money spent on preventing it when they do nothing to stop the cinemas hiking up the prices it makes me mad.

As a stand up comedian once said in response to a short anti piracy film before a movie - " No your right I would'nt steal a car but if someone said they could make a copy for £5 I would buy it".

Stop making me feel bad about piracy and star making me feel better about going to the cinema and the results might just surprise you.

10 pounds is a lot, jd stagpump. I'm lucky that in Canada prices used to be $14 around 2000 and are now about $12, so I'm happy they've dropped, although the Canadian ads we're forced to watch in exchange before the film are atrocious and painful.

I had a friend who worked as a manager in a cinema. The cinemas have to bid to show the movies. i.e., they have to pay. Concessions is where they make most of their money. I feel your pain. I don't like spending that much on movies either (I buy lots of tickets ahead of time at a 20% discount). But it depends on what you define as a rip-off. The actors get paid millions, even up to $20M (not for this film, though). The special effects are very expensive. Filming in multiple locations, advertising, marketing, it all gets rolled up. So long as you are willing to pay it, they'll keep collecting. Look for some ways you can bulk purchase advance tickets to save some money.

I agree that cinemas don't hav emuch say in what they may charge. a cinema is owned by a conglemarate and in reality a cinema has no ore say then what the maager ant duane reade charges for asprin. But if prices were lower I would certaintly go more often. Some one olet me borrow a copy of watchmen and thats how i saw the film. it didn't cost me $30 for me and my wife. I didn't shell out $1 at the concession stand and I didn't watch any comercials. Who wouldn't watch a bootleg/

thats why were seeing home theatre setups coming around, so for the cost of 20-25 bucks for a blue ray you can watch a movie all you want on a decent screen with good sound, and No One talking to the movie or being ripped by the popcorn....
I still enjoy the theatre but its really getting to darn expencive to go sometimes...

Waaa! Stop your whining. It costs millions of dollars to make a film and the money needs to be made back plus a profit. I am happy to pay ten bucks to go see a movie, although lately most of my movie funds have been redirected to Blue Rays. Blue Rays are better than going to the movies if you have a good setup.

Why should Fox get so upset? It's looks like a real crap movie in the first place so who cares? Hell Fox probably did it themselves just to generate buzz cause they know it is a piece of crap.

Oh, you're brilliant mykl. Just brilliant.

What nobody's talking about, really, is that this is the first salvo in a much longer-term situation. Look at the music industry - it's extremely rare for an album not to be leaked online before its retail release. The only reason this hasn't happened to movies so far is bandwidth, or the lack thereof; when downloading a few gigs become the equivalent to downloading a couple dozen megs today, you're going to see online movie piracy explode, and the film industry is going to end up facing a lot of the same issues the music industry faced five or six years ago.

The funny thing is that with music piracy downloading alone was proven not to adversely affect sales. In fact it showed the opposite. Its the same with movies.

Gumbercules, who's to say that movie piracy hasn't already "exploded". With high speed internet, you can download HUGE files in a few hours or minutes. A friend of mine regularly downloads hi-def episodes of "The Office" in 5-15 minutes, hour-longs like "24" in hi-def in like 45 minutes, and two-hour movies in 2-4 hours. Start the download, get some dinner, and BLAM you have a hi-def video to watch at home.

Studios are run by large corporations that are obsessed with profit. They are spending millions to produce the movie so they want the most money they can get for their investment. That's where they screw us. They try to get as much from us as they can before it hits DVD or BR and they loose control. I've even read that their ultimate goal is to turn all home viewing into a form of on-demand. They hate it that we can watch a purchased or rented video as often as we want without paying each time :(

This tatic worked for the new version of Dr. Who. Someone got fired but it helped get it on our radar. For TV I can see no harm on this but for a huge budget movie this is a disaster. I saw someone watching a DVD version of the movie on a train today. I thought it was the trailer but once I realized what it was I did not want to see any more of it - would rather wait for the legit version. This should be a huge signal to the movie industry to smarten up and lock their films down. All the time, effort, and money spent developing a movie to see it released on the internet and bootlegs a month before the release - shame. The FBI and Interpol should be doing their jobs. The money lost will put a stangle hold on the movie industry if this continues. With all the technology we have it should not take long to secure films in development and in the theater. I hope they catch the person(s) who release it - seriously.

*If* I had somehow seen the video in question, I can tell you that it wouldn't keep me from seeing it in the theater and buying a copy, since that was already a foregone concusion. You are a fan, or you're not in many cases. And, hey, after screwing Joss Whedon over for six episodes of Dollhouse (as an example of a very long line of examples where total idiot Fox execs that should not be anywhere near the entertainment business (or children for that matter) have completely stultified what were otherwise great shows/movies), it still won't keep me away from an X-Men property. I can't be sad for Fox getting screwed for anything really. Ugh, I HATE those guys.

I think Fox stole and posted the movie themselves. All it would take would someone from the marketing department to slip an underpaid overworked PA a few bucks to "accidentally" forward a digital copy to the marketing department.The marketing department's IT workers format the movie and upload it to various filesharing sites. Fox's executives feign outrage at the so-called piracy, a controversy ensues, a freelance writer takes one for the team and voila -- free publicity for a very expensive, potentially risky film.