Piracy notwithstanding, MPAA enjoys a “very strong year”—again

Yet again, the US movie industry's overall revenues are up substantially from the previous year. Revenue for movie studios went up four percent globally in 2013 to $35.9 billion, according to a report released yesterday by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) during CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

While the US/Canada box office for the year was $10.9 billion (an uptick of just 1 percent from 2012), led by blockbusters like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Iron Man 3, the meteoric rise of the international marketplace has driven the industry's massive profitability. The international market now constitutes 70 percent of all revenue, up from 64 percent in 2009.

The newest figures show that the industry remains healthy despite continued and over-simplistic rhetoric by the MPAA that the sky is falling for the movie business due to the effects of online piracy (see its figures for how much money piracy "costs" the US annually).

Complaints about piracy have been a common refrain in MPAA rhetoric back to the days of early VCRs in the 1980s. But the industry was healthy then, and the newest figures show it remains so.


Global Box Office—All Films (US $ Billions).
Rentrak Corporation
China: Problem or solution?

Some of the best news in the report is that American movies are seeing success in China, which has become the first international market to reach more than $3 billion in movie sales. The Chinese enthusiasm for US-produced movies comes despite the fact that China continues to restrict the number of foreign-made films that can be released in theaters to 34 imports a year.

But the country at the top of the MPAA's sales charts is also at the top of its piracy target list. Last year, the MPAA placed China on the list of the “most notorious” markets for distributing pirated movies and TV shows. As reported by the LA Times, MPAA spokesperson Michael O’Leary has explained:

The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets through the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life. These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets' viability and curbing US competitiveness.
Despite prolific piracy, China's increase in sales has been positively "meteoric," MPAA chief Chris Dodd said at a press conference yesterday, noting a 27 percent increase.

The movie studios are doing objectively great business. If the MPAA spent less time trying to discredit those driving their profits and more time trying to make good movies (that don't recycle the same plot lines over and over), the industry might be doing even better.