Russian Cinemas Resort to Pirating Hollywood as Domestic Movies Flop

Russian cinemas have returned to the post-Ukraine war practice of showing pirated screenings of Hollywood movies after a recent effort to push domestic films flopped.

After major U.S. movie studios said in 2022 that they would be pulling out of the country in response to the war in Ukraine, many Russian movie theaters illegally screened pirated copies of Hollywood movies, coupled with domestically produced short films.

In a bid to support domestic movies, the Russian Association of Cinema Owners (RACO) asked that cinema chains stop this practice from April 18 to May 12.

However, domestic films failed to perform despite the initiative, and a number of theaters have returned to showing Hollywood movies, Russian publication RBC reported on Wednesday.

"For the first 12 days of May, with a large number of days off and the absence of alternative content, the collections [at the box office] are very sad—1.1 billion rubles [about $12,000]," Pavel Ponikarovsky, a RACO council member and the head of Lumen Film, a cinema chain in Russia, told the publication.

In April, the company "recorded a loss for the first time in several months," Ponikarovsky said.

He said that in March, when cinemas weren't limited to showing only domestic films, his company earned 4.2 billion rubles [about $46,000] from Russian movies. In April, this figure fell to 2.3 billion [about $25,200].

Alexey Voronkov, RACO chairman, also said that box office collections fell short of expectations.

"The May holidays in terms of box-office receipts are also below expectations: two large four-day weekends should have brought in at least one-and-a-half to two times more than what was collected now," said Voronkov.

In February, Russian state news outlet RT reported that Western sanctions have had a positive impact on the variety of local content available on national streaming services. It said that there are now a record number of domestic movies and TV series appearing there.

RT cited Russian research agency Telecom Daily as saying that, while Russian streaming platforms experienced a drop in content from January 2022 (31,800 titles) to January 2023 (29,700 titles), by November 2023, the number of titles available grew to 31,900—more than were available prior to the war in Ukraine.

The publication attributed this partly to the growing number of TV series produced domestically. It also said movies and TV series from South Korea, Turkey, and India have replaced U.S. blockbusters.

"We quickly made up for these losses with original content; we've added more Russian movies, as well as Turkish and Korean TV series," Elvira Dmitrievskaya, deputy CEO for Russian streaming platform Okko, told RBC.

"A year and a half or two years ago, the market was completely different. All online platforms were going after exclusive foreign content. Now [they] focus on the production of original series and invest in Russian films, because, in one way or another, four out of five subscribers watch domestic content," Dmitrievskaya added.

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