News Desk |
A German firm in their recent report has declared Mahira Khan’s ‘Raees’ as the most pirated movie of 2017. It was followed by Hrithik Roshan’s ‘Kaabil’ and Akshay Kumar’s ‘Jolly LLB 2′.
Raees’ was pirated 6,187,379 times. Kaabil and Jolly LLB 2 were pirated 5,263,526 and 4,435,585 times respectively. Rahul Dholakia, the director of Raees expressed his concern over the worrying statistics on Twitter.
#Raees most Pirated film of 2017. Now how does one react to this ? @ritesh_sid
— rahul dholakia (@rahuldholakia) January 17, 2018
“I would love people to see Raees but not this way. It’s frustrating and all the more disheartening because the pirated prints are now getting HD quality. You put so much money and effort and theatrical sales get badly affected,”
Kaabil director, Sanjay Gupta said how Rakesh Roshan had to take extraordinary measures to tackle the piracy. According to him, Rakesh Roshan had to hire private companies to monitor the illegal upload of content on the internet.
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“Rakesh Ji endured torture and agony. With help from private companies hired to monitor piracy, he had taken over 3,400 websites where the film was illegally available within the first three days of its release.”
Similarly, Subash Kapoor, the director of Jolly LLB 2 accused the authorities of not effectively controlling the growing business of piracy. The director pressed the authorities to take viable action against the miscreants harming the industry.
“Whether it is the government or the producers’ bodies that need to act, they’re not doing enough. We need comprehensive policy introduced by the government. They don’t understand the seriousness of the situation, and how it’s harming the industry.”
Raees and Kaabil were released on the same day in January of the preceding year. Yet both the movies were unsuccessful at the box office but had the largest number of shares online.
The information shared by the German firm suggests around 62 lakh users shared Raees and 52 lakh users watched ‘Kaabil’ online.
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Pakistan recorded a share of 16% in the statistics of the worldwide audiences sharing the files of these Bollywood movies online. ‘Kaabil’ performed well in peer-to-peer sharing.
Indeed the growing business of piracy undermines the profitability of the entertainment industry. However, the piracy statistics offers an alternative aspect of insight into the performance and popularity of the movie among the greater audiences.
It’s not just the number of watchers flocking to cinemas that define the popularity of the movie, but the high demand for the movie in the virtual world speaks volumes for the popularity of the content.
“Even if it sounds counter-intuitive, they can actually be used to generate beneficial market insights by analyzing how single movies perform in peer-to-peer networks worldwide,” stated a spokesperson for the German firm.
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The piracy statistics also bring into question the factors that make people prefer watching certain movies on the big screen. While for others they remain to stick to the screens of their personal devices.