AVENGERS MAY BE SETTING MIDWEEK RECORDS, TOO

Disney/Marvel’s The Avengers continued to rack up ticket sales during midweek that would have been the envy of any studio on a weekend. On Monday, the movie earned $18.9 million, followed by $17.7 million on Tuesday. Those would appear to be near-record — or possibly record — figures for a film that did not open midweek. (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows registered $18 million on its first Monday and $15.4 million on Tuesday.) As of Tuesday, The Avengers had grossed $244,014,897 domestically, according to Box Office Mojo. [UPDATE: The Avengers added an additional $13.6 million on Wednesday.] The enormous earnings — higher than any film in history — have come despite the fact a pirated copy of the movie became available online even before the film’s domestic release. (It opened a week earlier overseas.) Ernesto, the pseudonym of the founder of the Dutch-based website TorrentFreak.com, which tracks BitTorrent usage, said he was not surprised that although the movie was downloaded 500,000 times, it apparently had no impact on the film’s success. “We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low-quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all,” he wrote. “If anything, downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances. … The claim that camcorded films are killing the movie industry is nonsense and spending millions of dollars on anti-camcording technologies is simply not worth it.”