The Asian Bootleg Craze

After a screening of Hero let out last year, conversations immediately broke out among the audience about not only that film, but Asian film in general. And the titles flowed like water off their tongues, Battle Royale, Oldboy, 2046. The list keeps going.

The funniest part of it all being that none of these films, at the time of the discussion, had even seen the official light of day in this country.

The world of the film fanatic is a different place from five years ago, to say the least. With the rise of DVD has come hassles of a brand new sort for those attempting to keep the profits from a film going straight back into the pockets of the people who helped make it. For aficionados of foreign film, however, the horrors of piracy are conflicted with eager joy. In Hong Kong, every creative property under the sun from every country will have a bootleg release, from the biggest Hollywood blockbuster to the sleaziest of cable porn. And right in between are films like Battle Royale, Infernal Affairs, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

As awareness of smaller indie films has grown, so has awareness of action/horror/sci-fi/drama/thriller flicks from countries not our own, and the demand is just as high. Unfortunately, the process of supplying said films hasn't been made much easier. A lot of it is, of course, the difficulty of two studios on opposite sides of the Pacific coming to an agreement. And yes, we have studios like Sony taking the lead, and giving their acquired films the treatment they deserve, from theatrical release to the decent DVD treatment. But on the other end of the spectrum are the Miramaxes of the world, who've been hoarding their properties since day one, for reasons beyond comprehension.

The story behind their treatment of Hero is the stuff of legend. The studio sat on the film for years, slapping lawsuits on anybody who tried to point the way to the film without going through them. It took a push from Quentin Tarantino to get that film released, and in the meanwhile, the bootleg was snatched up by the handful.

The strange thing was, even with that dubious fact, when the film actually did get released, it still went on to open #1 at the U.S. box office, gross $53 million (on no more than 2,000 screens, even), and the official DVD release was a success.

How much of that was made up of the same cinephiles who bought some imported version and raved to his friends about it? We'll never know that for sure. But without a doubt, it was a sizeable part of it. And as a result, a great film was seen and appreciated by a larger audience than it would have.

With Asian bootlegs no longer the sole realm of Z-grade martial arts films, giving access and exposure to films that wouldn't see the light of day otherwise, their impact on the world of foreign film can't be denied.

Sadly, it's hard to come up with a mutually beneficial solution. Piracy is stealing, no matter how you cut it. And there are films that, for one reason or another, most of us will never see.

The only thing studios can do is what film fans have been begging them to do since the beginning: release the films sooner rather than later, and don't cut out anything in the process. And the only thing we can really do is be patient....and show the studios how we feel about their treatment of beloved films with our wallets, not our piracy.