Seen Spidey. Have you?
April 30, 2007

If you haven’t been to a pre-release screening of a potential  Hollywood blockbuster lately, please consider this Spider-Man 3 example as a demonstration of how the studios have upped the ante in their quest to control piracy in the Internet age.

I arrived at the theater last Thursday night with my eight year-old son, Scott, to be greeted by polite calls of “No cell phones; no PDAs; no electronic devices of any kind.” Luckily, Scott had left his DS in the car, because I think a Sony security guard would have had to wrestle him to get it away and I would have been banned from the Sony realm forever. As for the rest of us, our "devices" went into ticketed brown paper bags, stapled shut in front of us, as our satchels were thoroughly examined. We were then wanded down, which my son and every other kid under 12 got a huge kick out of.

(And to think I was worried about getting caught sneaking in a cheeseburger for the boy!)

On to the theater, where the crowd was still not to be trusted: The Sony security guards who lined the aisles watched the audience throughout through some sort of night vision binoculars.

I think I spent a quarter of the movie watching them watch us. Good news, as far as I could see: all the action was up on the screen. I saw no pirates taken down in the theater.

There’s something surreal about going through a security checkpoint to watch a movie—even Spider-Man 3—but obviously, it’s working.

Sony trumpeted the fact that, as of the day we saw Spidey, the studio had found no evidence of piracy of the film, either on DVD or on the Internet. There were alleged Spider-Man 3 DVDs being sold on the streets of Beijing for $1, but that turned out to be a case of pirated box art only and a consumer rip-off by the pirates.

So, for now, Gotham, Los Angeles, and all the metropolises in between are safe from bogus superheroes. And the security drill will be practiced all over again at screenings of Shrek the Third, Pirates 3, Fantastic Four: Silver Surfer, and so on…

Posted by Marcy Magiera on April 30, 2007 | Comments (0)