Research Blog Inquiry Three: One

The research article I found talks about a case study two professors did in April 2009. The study shows how file sharing affects theater attendance. They released a copy of X Men Origins: Wolverine a full month before its theatrical debut. The movie was downloaded about one million times in its first week and four and a half million times prior to the movie being released in theaters. This case provides a unique opportunity to see what impact file sharing has on movies. It provides a worst-case scenario in which a high quality copy of a movie was readily available prior to its release also; it shows how the promotion associated with the theatrical release influences the number of downloads on the file-sharing network. They analyze the data by relating the number of peers who downloaded the movie to theatrical demand along with the Internet latency. It is not clear how close peers have to be to a theater to influence the demand but the farther away you are from a theater the more the movie is downloaded. Overall, the results indicate that the download of the movie Wolverine prior to its release in theaters has a positive impact on the box office.  The two professors said “that while this conclusion is intriguing and perhaps counter intuitive result, it is important to remember that the parameters are imprecisely estimated. This is not surprising since we are essentially looking at a case study of a single movie.”


This case study will be a great use of a real world example for my paper seeing that most people know who the comic book character Wolverine is. The study really opens my eyes to how often movies are illegally downloaded. This will be useful to my paper because this shows one way that illegally downloading  can have a positive impact on the movie industry. That could be used as a rebuttal in my paper.


Strompf, Koleman, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee. "The Impact of File Sharing on Movies." UCDavis.edu March 2012. n.pag. Miami Library. Web. 20 Jul 2012.