Welcome to Dave's blog. Usually, I'm with Thomas running Zombie defense drills in the woods or chasing down the best pizza in Knoxville.
-
C&D on a junky week
Halfway through a crappy week. I walked out to the car this morning to go to work and noticed what looked like my car window rolled all the way down. To my pleasant surprise it was not down but rather in 15,000 pieces on the pavement.
Some nice person decided to rid me of my burden of listening to music on my morning commutes and was gracious enough to take my CD player and Sirius radio. They even tried to get the Sirius antenna but it was glued down and they had to leave it.
Jokes on them….those antennas cost a lot!
This came on the heels of the almighty WB issuing C&D letters to anyone who put up the opening credits to the Watchmen. Essentially the dudes who made the opening credits put it online without permission and even had a nice “download” link to get a juicy Quicktime version. Within hours it was all over the Internet eventually including our site not knowing it should not be shared or enjoyed.
The WB, fearing the worst, jumped into action and had the video taken down.
Now, I’m not sure if the WB did this because it would hurt their box office which was already doing poorly. Opening weekend came nowhere near breaking the $70 mil mark and if there is no big 2nd weekend it will be hard to call this movie anything other than a flop. Add a huge budget (+$140m (?) and +$50 advertising) and you can see where 3 studios will have a hard time enjoying the bottom line.
That’s not including 20th Century Fox’s claim to part of the gross.
Maybe they didn’t want people giving more poor reviews since fans and critics alike were not flocking to the movie.
“I hate to think that, after two fucking years of marketing, we’re a one-weekend movie,” a Warner Bros exec confessed.
What really amazes me is that the WB didn’t ride the great publicity of the opening credits being online. I truly understand their stance on protecting their copyrighted material and I’m not mad at them for being who they are and taking the clip down.
Essentially it sounds like some dudes at yU + Co., the group who made the credits, got a little too proud of themselves and put the clip online. After a bitch slap from WB they scurried to cover their asses including some letters to me.
It’s still real wild that big companies are so afraid of the Internet. The opening credits were a great free advertisement for the movie and may have influenced people pondering the trip to the cinema. Instead of using this to their advantage they stuck their head in the sand and cowered.
They could have reissued a shortened clip or streamed it from their own site to promote themselves. Instead the result was a flurry of negative legal threats that only ended up hurting their reputation with all the blogs and sites that are more than willing to gleefully spread the clip and give free promotion.
Free promotion they easily could of used.
After this back week the only solace I can have is that somewhere Alan Moore is laughing his ass off.
