Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

In Italy between the movies were screening in the cinemas and dvd releases there was a wait time of 3 months. Exactly three months. The most common way of piracy was streaming websites (like cineblog nowadays) pestered with ads. Before the age of WEBDL most people who couldn't pay for the cinemas and everybody who wanted to have lots to talk about pop arts and trends was watching cam rips. The quality of cam rips were ever increasing every year with specialized forums discussing hardware to do it. I remember you could find everything from low quality phone cams (we are talking 2006 phone cameras) rips to tv quality cameras pointed to the screen from inside the cinemas with tripods.

Project X was such a hyped up movie in Italy that I personally witnessed a bunch of people recording it in the cinemas and everybody at school was sharing the phones on which the movie was recorded during lessons.

To be honest camrips started to disappear during and after covid, but even now for very famous movies like Barbie and Hoppeneimer of Marvel stuff people are still downloading those.

For reference:

• avg ticket price in italy: 6.25 euro in 2022, 5.75 euro in 2016. If you count inflation, price basically decreased over the years
• most cinemas do many cheap ticket nights like for students or young people aimed at 2-5 euro range for tickets once a week or once a month
• more realistically, most cinemas have tickets for 8 or 9 euros, 10 to 12 euros in big cities
• around 60% of people earn less than 1300 euro net per month. That is an hourly pay of ~5 euros. You can understand how much a movie night for a family with popcorns and various extra may cost for a family.