After the mandatory turn-of-the year best and worst film lists comes a unique compendium of 'the most pirated Hindi movies of 2017'. And it’s not just domestic netizens preferring their personal devices over the big screen for watching Bollywood flicks, but even Pakistanis who have developed a penchant for sharing films made in India.
The surprise toppers of the list, compiled by a German firm TECXIPIO GmbH, are the year's box-office duds — Shahrukh Khan's Raees and Hrithik Roshan’s Kaabil . The two films, which incidentally were released on the same day last January, had disappointed fans and had an insipid run at the box office. Jolly LLB 2 came in third.
Yet, nearly 62 lakh users shared Raees and almost 53 lakh watched Kaabil online, as per the German firm’s list, based on the number of file sharers who downloaded and shared the respective movies in P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. Put together, these two movies had more online viewers than top grossers like Toilet-Ek Prem Katha (ranked 4), Golmaal Again ( ranked 7) and Judwaa 2 (ranked 10) combined.
“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,” an understandably dejected director Rahul Dholakia told The Hindu .
“At the time of its release, the talk of it being uploaded had started. I kept getting calls from the U.S. On the day of the release, we brought it down on 175 sites,” he recalled.
The highest density of fans-gone-rogue was obviously from major Indian cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Bengaluru — accounting for 60% of the total worldwide file sharers for these films on an average. Roughly 16% of those sharing files were from Pakistan, with Lahore listed among the top cities sharing the top 10 pirated Hindi films. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and CEO of media consulting firm Ormax Media, said the maximum shares for a film happen in the three-four months after its release. He isn't surprised that even much-reviled films like OK Jaanu (ranked 8) and Half Girlfriend (ranked 5) are pirated. “File sharing in India is metro and youth-skewed and these films target that demographic,” he pointed out.
While Indian film makers are bound to fret at the rising trend of movies being shared online and watched without a penny accruing to their box office tallies, the piracy charts throw up some insights for monetising their next venture better.
Isn’t providing piracy statistics to the entertainment industry even where content hasn't been officially released, out of the ordinary? “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 over email.
