Hollywood novelties “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in Russia will be shown in an online version, not a film distribution report “Vedomosti”. Viewers will not be able to see the films until autumn, the publication explains.
Leading film companies were able to figure out the scheme for supplying pirated copies to Russia for large screens, as well as their sellers, said the heads of two large film networks and a top manager of a film distribution company.
According to one of the interlocutors of the publication, there were several suppliers. First of all, these are cinemas from Kazakhstan, which we managed to calculate by the watermarks that the distributor puts when transferring copies of films to cinemas. Some of the copies were not marked. It follows from this that the leak could have occurred in the major’s office in the CIS or structures associated with it or involved in the work on the localization of the film.
What was the punishment for the participants in the scheme of illegal distribution is unknown, but now it is almost impossible to find offers to sell a theatrical copy of the films of Hollywood companies.
Previously, new items were released in domestic cinemas at almost the same time as around the world. To do this, a “pre-session service” scheme was used. To do this, a third-party company rented cinema halls for showing short films, but before that it showed foreign blockbusters to the viewer for free. Using this method, the Russians managed to watch Spider-Man: The Web of Universes (511 million rubles), Fast and Furious 10 (according to the profile publication Film Distributor’s Bulletin, its fees amounted to 541 million rubles). The highest-grossing “unofficial” release was James Cameron’s “Avatar 2”, which earned 1.9 billion rubles.
Two interlocutors of the publication note that it is now impossible to predict the release of new products. It all depends on when digital pirated copies of films (online versions) appear, since cinemas will be forced to show such copies on the big screen. In addition, distributors will have to deal with the issue of professional voice acting and translation, which will require investments.
Without dubbing the song and the participation of well-known dubbing arists, it is possible to adapt the film for the Russian audience within a week, which will cost about $20,000-$35,000, said Anton Sirenko, general director of the Content Club company (a former distributor of films from one of the Hollywood studios). .
The digital premiere of “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” should not be expected until autumn: in the case of box office Hollywood hits, the “digital window” reaches 100 days. Movies with a not very large number of views will get into online rental faster. For example, The Flash and Shazam 2: Wrath of the Gods appeared on streaming services just a month after their offline release.
According to Vadim Vereshchagin, General Director of Central Partnership, the sound and picture quality of this format is worse than that of a copy for a theatrical display.
“In the online version, the picture was initially adapted to a different screen format. And no matter how good the quality of the video is on the Internet, after compression, when shown on the big screen, it will be very different from the JPEG2000 format, which is used for theatrical film distribution,” the expert noted.
Barbie and Oppenheimer were released worldwide on July 21st. Barbie grossed $155 million in the U.S. over the weekend, Jeff Goldstein, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros., said in a statement.
“We were expecting $75 million in the opening weekend. Nobody foresaw $155 million,” Goldstein said. Barbie became the highest-grossing debut of the year, surpassing The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which made $146.4 million in its opening weekend in April, according to Bloomberg.
