Did Miramax Give Torrent Seeker A Free Movie Ticket?

from the odder-things-have-happened... dept

Really not sure what to make of this one, but people keep submitting it, so might as well put it out there to see what people think: apparently, a girl in NY complained on Twitter that she couldn’t find the movie Adventureland online to download as a torrent, and Miramax (which put out the film), Twittered back telling her that she shouldn’t download it (and, in a slightly creepy way, included the hashtag #fbi). The girl supposedly wrote back: “Okay I won?t, JUST FOR YOU,” at which point, Miramax promised her two free tickets to the movie (though, in the end, she supposedly only got one).

What’s odd is that the reactions among submitters has gone to both extremes — with one group finding it freaky and suggesting that it would piss off fans of the movie — while others actually found it oddly humanizing and endearing by Miramax (though… pretty much everyone felt that the whole FBI reference could have been left aside). I’m leaning a bit towards the latter option. As I noted when the Wolverine leak happened, studios are never going to be able to stop unauthorized file sharing, but they might as well figure out ways to act cool about it, and leverage it to their best advantage. It’s not clear which side of that line Miramax is on right now… but hopefully it closer to acting cool, rather than acting as a creepy stalker.

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Companies: miramax, twitter

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Comments on “Did Miramax Give Torrent Seeker A Free Movie Ticket?”

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9 Comments
krharrison says:

I don't think it was cool...

Miramax lost it for me when they used the #fbi hashtag. This wasn’t the first one they used.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=miramaxfilms+%23fbi

One tweet says “Wow, you really want to admit that. You can’t delete tweets you know. #fbi”

Another: “miramaxfilms: @theoisjonesing cmon man, don’t tell us your going to be a pirate. #adventureland #fbi”

Why not find out why they feel the need to use torrents instead of vaguely threatening to turn you in.

Anonymous Coward says:

Amanda doesn’t seem to think that Miramax’ usage of the #FBI tag was threatening, so I don’t know why we should. I saw this yesterday or the day before on Wired, and immediately thought about Mike’s comments on Wolverine, and how Miramax was turning a possible negative into a positive. When you’ve got a limited budget to spend on entertainment, and you’ve got a choice to see a film from a studio with a good rep vs one running the MPAA party line, which way are you going to go? I’d assume most folks would go with the “good guys”, unless the other film was just head and shoulders above the first one. So Miramax spends a few bucks on a ticket, and receives MUCH more than a ticket’s price worth of goodwill AND free positive advertising (and since Amanda’s from NY, perhaps the tickets cost twice what they do elsewhere, so she could only get one, wouldn’t surprise me).

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