I did gloss it over in my write up though I did not forget it. I somewhat addressed that in my closing question. To expand, I think that there are some people who just enjoy going to the movies. For whatever reason, for them, all the risks of the annoying behaviour that you describe together with the cost are shadowed by the pleasure of their experience. Maybe it is just about doing something out in public, or whatever. I dunno. If we assume this, then it is possible that the pre-release leak of the movie would incline their choice of movie (given that they've *already* decided to go to the theater) towards a new release that just became available in pirated form.
I personally find $25 to see a movie with my wife a bit hard to swallow and tend to only go on somebody else's suggest (to be social), but some people really enjoy the theater experience and would pay regardless of whether the film is available in pirated form or not.
My suspicion is that file sharing would only affect the segment of people who value being up on the latest movies but don't value the theatre experience.
As an aside, the report at http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content... provides some interesting statistics about ticket sale volume (in summary, "2012 U.S./Canada box office was $10.8 billion, up 6% compared to $10.2 billion in 2011, and up 12% from five
years ago.", "The 2012 increase in U.S./Canada box office was due to an equivalent increase in admissions (6%) compared to
2011, as admissions reached 1.36 billion,", "More than two-thirds of the U.S./Canada population (68%) – or 225 million people – went to the movies at least
once in 2012, consistent with prior years."
If you assume piracy has been increasing over the last few years then the stats that MPAA is releasing don't really seem to lead to the conclusion that it is affecting ticket sales in a negative fashion.