Avi Lerner Talks EX3 Piracy

Avi Lerner has spoken again recently about The Expendables 3 leaking scandal of the summer.  The chief producer warns that the film business is in dire straits because of piracy.  “The whole film business is going to be the same as the music business,” warns Lerner. “Within five years, we’re not going to have a business.”  The Expendables 3 was said to have been downloaded 10 million times just weeks after it had leaked.  With the fact that multiple people in one room likely watched each download, serious damage was dealt to its financial run.

“Why should people pay $10 or $12 to see a movie when they can get it for free?” asks Lerner. “I’m talking about hundreds of millions of people that saw a movie before it opened in a cinema. This is terrible. Piracy is the worst situation that ever happened.”

Even worse, Lerner doesn’t see anything being done that will stop piracy. “It’s sad because if we had a good president that cared about the film industry he would pass a very simple law, an anti-piracy law, but they don’t want to stop it because they are scared of Google, and he’s scared of all the ISPs.”  A final thought here, it sounds like Lerner may have given up on filing 10 million lawsuits from those words.  An earlier attempt to sue Expendables 1 downloaders had also failed.

The Expendables 3 by the way still managed to gross $200,000,000 which is impressive given that it was the weakest of the three, the PG-13 controversy and of course this leak…

Source: [THR]