The Dark Knight hit theaters two weeks ago to monumental hype, an unmatched marketing budget, and rave reviews from critics and fans. But according to Warner Bros., the Dark Knight’s record $158 million opening weekend came all thanks to the movie company’s anti-piracy efforts.

The LA Times decided to regurgitate corporate spin profiling Warner Bros. “painstaking care to thwart pirates” preventing the movie from hitting file-sharing networks.  The six month anti-piracy bonanza kept camcorder versions of the film off the web for a whole 38 hours, by Friday night.

Warner Bros. is once again missing the point.  Dark Knight did this well because it’s an amazing movie people wanted to see.  That’s why IMAX theaters were sold out into August before the movie opened.  A theater experience, especially IMAX, is a different experience than a person can get at home, whether its a social outing or better quality facilities with surround sound and bigger screens. Word-of-mouth likely helped Dark Knight break the record for second weekend gross, a week after pirated copies surfaced.

The LA Times tries to support Warner Bros. theory, but ends up proving otherwise.  It cites Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk got leaked two weeks before the movie opened leading to terrible reviews from fans.  The movie wasn’t that good, though it still made $62 million its opening weekend, even with pirated DVDs having a two week head start.

The LA Times also points out Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith had DVD-quality screeners leaked online days before the movie opened.  But good reviews and word of mouth led the movie to gross $380 million domestically.

What the LA Times left out was how much money and man power Warner Bros. wasted on its anti-piracy efforts and how much of that could have been shifted to marketing or merchandising or just saved.  Pirates will get copies of movies and they will share them.  Movies succeed when they are quality pictures offered in compelling ways so people want to see them.  Maybe Warner Bros. should lessen its six month anti-piracy efforts and think up ways to make the movie experience even more compelling.

The last hold-out for HD exclusivity has apparently joined the Blu-Ray team, as reported by the USA Today.  Many blogs and pundits were predicting the largest seller of DVDs would announce its exclusivity at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show.  With Blu-Ray discs outselling HD-DVD more than 2 to 1, Warner Brothers’ move is likely to expedite an end to the high-def format war with Blu-Ray as the winner.

In August, Paramount went HD-DVD exclusive even though Blu-Ray had a small lead, prolonging the format war.

The announcement makes me wonder about another prediction spreading around the internet about an Ultimate Xbox 360 to be announced by Bill Gates’ keynote at CES.  The Ultimate 360 sounds like a geek wet dream with improved hardware, silent fan, built-in WiFi, IPTV service, 320 GB hard drive and a built-in HD-DVD drive.  The IPTV is probably happening (screen shots have already been leaked) but how embarrassing would the HD-DVD drive be should the format fail. As exciting as the prospect could be, the truth is the next week would be all about bashing Microsoft desperately jumping on some anti-Sony bandwagon.  It also lends credence to director Michael Bay’s theory that Microsoft wants the format war to continue so it can bolster its video download service.

Also, if Microsoft decided to include the HD-DVD drive, what happens to game makers?  Can they make games using the HD-DVD discs?  If so, that means Microsoft single-handled spreads the format war into video games where no format war (except consoles themselves) existed.  And that’s just mean. 

This is of course total speculation and quite a segue from the subject of this post, so just consider this my pre-CES posting.  Go Gears of War 2 announcement!