According to enigmax, writing for TorrentFreak, Mr Bond’s 22nd big screen outing (Quantum of Solace) leaked onto the Internet before it bowed in the US last weekend.
That’s despite a massive counter-piracy campaign in the UK (where the film opened two weeks ago) involving cinema staff donning night vision goggles (supplied by Q?) to catch camcorder users in the act.
This news came in the same week that Detica, a business and technology consultancy, urged the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) ‘to shift the focus of its consultation process away from enforcement when considering legislative options for addressing illicit peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.’
Detica reckons enforcement is too costly and time-consuming so efforts should instead be directed towards giving consumers access to reasonably (and flexibly) priced legal downloads. This sounds like a sensible option given that an army of begoggled cinema ushers still failed to prevent the camcordering of everyone's favourite spy.
So has peer-to-peer filesharing had any material impact on Bond’s theatrical performance? Yes, probably. But we’ll never know for certain the order of magnitude involved.
Yet the film’s distributors and producers can take some comfort from the early box office results. QoS had a record-breaking opening day in the UK, and went on to amass £15.4 million by the end of the first weekend.
And despite its online availability, QoS had the highest US opening of any previous film in the franchise, grossing around $70 million according to early estimates (Casino Royale managed around $40 million in its opening weekend at about the same time of year).
Which just goes to prove that in times of financial uncertainty, some bonds are a much safer bet than others.
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