An account of the influence of piracy on The Hateful Eight and The Revenant
By Bram Medelli
Most UCR students would answer “no” if they got asked whether they regularly steal. Yet, I am pretty sure a large chunk of the student population regularly pirates movies or uses PopcornTime. Obviously, it is not physically stealing but the results are the same: people who work lose money. Recent examples are Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015). Both were leaked online before they were released. This had some dreadful consequences for the films but a lot of people also missed out on a great experience of cinema.
In The Hateful Eight, bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting his target Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Leigh) through the wintery landscape of civil war America to be hanged in Red Rock. On his way he picks up a few unexpected passengers, a fellow bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and a man who claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock. However, a blizzard catches up to them and forces them to seek shelter in a stagecoach lodge by the name of ‘Minnie’s Haberdashery’, along with the already present guest. After a while tension begins to rise between the characters, which culminates in an interesting turn of events.
In The Revenant a group of frontiersmen leave their navigator, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, for dead after a gruesome bear attack. The story follows his journey back to civilisation and all the obstacles along the way, both in survival and redemption.
Both The Hateful Eight and The Revenant were amazing works of cinematic art. Both were quite the experience to see in the cinema. Sitting in a movie theatre makes sure you are surrounded by the film, you feel the film, you live the film. The big screen complements Tarantino’s storytelling and the glorious landscapes DiCaprio’s character roams. If you download the film and watch it on the screen of your laptop, the whole experience of the film is lost. You miss the feeling of the epic music over the surround sound speaker or the sensation of the insanely big screen that Cinecity Vlissingen offers us. That is a paramount downside of pirating, going to the cinema is definitely worth your money.
Furthermore, all the people that now downloaded these films instead of seeing them in the cinema are lost revenue for the film industry. Choosing not to support the industry by pirating films causes it to shrink, making it harder for people like Tarantino and DiCaprio to make a living out of these films. It is hard to say whether the leak was the only reason that The Hateful Eight underperformed at the box office. The fact that critics claim that The Hateful Eight is one of the lesser films that Tarantino has made may have caused people not to go. I disagree with the critics though. When I saw the film, I enjoyed all the Tarantino features such as the usual long conversations and great soundtracks over the cinema’s surround sound instead of my laptop’s speakers. There was not one moment where I could predict where the movie was heading. The Revenant is the movie that finally landed DiCaprio an Oscar for best actor in leading role! It is a very raw movie, which pits the protagonist against nature and follows him throughout his search for safety, which is much more of a spectacle on the silver screen.
Pirating a movie causes you to miss a great cinematic experience. I am not saying that you should go see all the films in a movie theatre but if you want to contribute to the film industry, definitely go to your near cinema with your friends to have a great day out!
Bram Medelli, Class of 2018, is an Arts & Humanities major, from Groesbeek, the Netherlands.
