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downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.

A recent study showed that the US box office is not suffering from movie piracy, but that there is a detrimental effect on international box office figures. The researchers attribute this impact to the wide release gaps, which sometimes result in a high quality DVD copy being available on pirate sites while a movie is still showing in theaters.

 

These high quality copies are more likely to “compete” with movie theater attendance and if a movie is not showing in local theaters at all, it definitely has the potential to impact future attendance.

 

This is even more true for the DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales. High quality pirated copies are direct competition and can impact revenues.

'Take Advantage of Foreign Labor'. The American spelling of 'Labor' could hardly be more apposite, since Hollywood surely has taken advantage of our federal government (and by extension, us taxpayers) in the case of 'The Wolverine'. The makers of this superhero film are getting a one-off $12.9 million subsidy to shoot in Sydney.

It is particularly interesting that Crash illustrates one of the deep truths of models of statistical discrimination: The real social conflict is not between groups, but within groups. People who are below-average for their group make life worse for people who are above-average for their group. Women who get job training and then quit to have children hurt the careers of single-minded career women, because they reduce the profitability of the average woman. This lesson is beautifully expressed in the scene where the successful black t.v. producer (Terrence Howard) chews out the black teen-ager (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) who unsuccessfully tried to car-jack him:

  

You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.

William Earnest, an assistant professor of communication at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, who contributed a chapter called "Making Gay Sense of the X-Men" to the textbook Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise edited by Barry S. Brummett. He says, "I think the movie would be less interesting, and much less fun, without [the romantic throughline]. I'm not sure, however, that the majority of moviegoers necessarily recognize the gay love affair, coded as it is, but I do think they'd notice its absence.

The two leads of X-Men: First Class meet cute when Charles Xavier saves Erik Lehnsherr from drowning during a revengey assault on a evil overlord's yacht, and in their first exchange Erik confesses, "I thought I was alone," while Charles reassures, "No, you're not…I'm like you." Sure, they're officially talking about the whole mutant thing, but the language also transfers perfectly to what two closeted males in the 1960s might say to each other as they experienced the gaydar ping of their lives.

 

Shortly thereafter, Erik and Charles set off to adopt a brood of X-babies they can raise at Xavier's mansion, during which Hugh Jackman's Wolverine makes a brief cameo appearance and encourages the future superhero and supervillain to "go f--k yourselves." Sure, you could say that the line is simply Wolverine being his usual bitchy self, but we say the line was planted to hint that Charles and Erik then quite literally go f--k each other.

not only do the two share a bed in a strip club, share a mind meld so powerful they're both brought to tears, and co-parent the X-babies in preparation for the battle against Shaw (Kevin Bacon), they somehow find time to loll around together on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial while "playing chess" and gazing at the oh-so-phallic Washington Monument.

Facebook could’ve mitigated the potential negative attention from the movie through deflection. What would’ve been wrong with Zucks and Facebook “bigging up” the film by indicating to the press that it’s kind of cool to have a movie made about your life and company? They could’ve even talked about all the things the movie got right and fondly reminisced about the good times of the early days during the many interview requests around the launch of the movie.

Team Zucks could’ve even hosted some sort of premiere event for the movie (besides the uneventful renting out of a theater for staff and then going out for Apple-tinis) and then doing a light presser afterwards to playfully point out some of the inaccuracies, all the while praising the writing and performances. Or at a minimum Mark Zuckerberg could’ve showed he was a good sport by attending the actual premiere for “The Social Network.” All of these tactics would’ve gone a long way in killing any negative coverage in its infancy.

With every media outlet on God’s green earth writing glowing articles about “The Social Network” Facebook decided to come out swinging. It appeared that they tackled this issue from a two-pronged approach: dispute the accuracy of the movie on the one hand and push out as much news and company stories as humanly possible in a short period on the other. Their mission was crystal clear – dominate the news cycle and make people forget about….what’s the name of that movie again?