Matthew Yglesias has an amusing post about the Chinese pirated version of Old Boy, a Korean film recently remade in the U.S. Alas, the DVD cover included a negative blurb of the film:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Oops. Yglesias writes that “the marketing aspects of the industry still haven’t perfected their work.” Well, that’s one way to look at it. The other is that pirated DVDs in China often contain some combination of these more basic errors:
- A marketing blurb from an entirely different film.
- A mismatched title, actor, or cover photograph
- A credit listing from a different film (this happens almost 100% of the time)
- The cover from a different version of the same film. (For example once I bought a DVD of the Japanese film Shall We Dance only to get home and find that instead I had acquired the Richard Gere-starring American remake.)
Pirated movies in China sell for as little as $1, so there’s little incentive for manufacturers to invest time and resources into details like marketing. As long as the movie itself works—no guarantee, by the way—customers care less about the accuracy on the paper cover. In fact, they’re actually a form of free entertainment.
My sense from talking to friends in China is that far fewer people bother buying DVDs, anyway; downloading is that much easier. In a way, this is too bad—slinking into corner stores to buy pirated movies was a major part of my China experience, especially during the first couple of years.…
