Looks like some good news / bad news for "Spider-Man 3." On one hand the flick’s tickets are selling like hotcakes already. On the other hand, you can already buy a bootleg in the streets of Beijing for about a buck. (Allegedly.)
The movie doesn’t open until May 4th, but ticketing site Fandango.com is reporting some pretty astonishing numbers. Apparently the flick claimed almost fifty percent of their sales on Monday. For a movie that doesn’t come out for over a week! Movietickets.com says the tickets are selling triple what "Spider-Man 2" did at this point. Apparently those "tracking numbers" are really huge. (As if any of this is a surprise.)
On the other side of the equation, one source indicates that "SM3" is already available for purchase on the streets of Beijing. Obviously this copy would be of stunningly poor quality, if it even works at all. But Sony states that the bootleg report is totally wrong: "Our investigation in China has revealed no case of the film being pirated to date." They make a good point, too: If the movie was already bootlegged and sold on street-corners, then it definitely would have made its way online by now. Fortunately, it hasn’t.
"I was already planning to kick some pirate butt this summer."
As if any self-respecting movie fan would want to watch a grainy, grungy, nasty bootleg of something like "Spider-Man 3."
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, Reuters, Movieweb
