The interesting thing about black/gray markets is that they crop up when demand isn't otherwise being met. So yeah, the Avengers gets pirated for one of two reasons:
1) It's not available where people want to watch it
2) It's not available for a price they want to pay
It's a fascinating problem, really. I doubt movie studios will ever be able to meet the "free" demand, but piracy in general has put all sorts of pressure on them to get movies into peoples' hands quicker. The Hunger Games was a huge hit and will be on BluRay within about 5 months of its theatrical release. It'll be out on iTunes at the same time.
Historically, this is a vast improvement. Titanic took about 10 months to go from theater to VHS. This was back in the day when places like Blockbuster had exclusive rental windows for a while too, so it was more like a year before non-pirates could purchase it for home use.
If people could reliably pirate high fidelity copies of movies between the theater and DVD releases, I suspect that timing would shrink even further.
1) It's not available where people want to watch it
2) It's not available for a price they want to pay
It's a fascinating problem, really. I doubt movie studios will ever be able to meet the "free" demand, but piracy in general has put all sorts of pressure on them to get movies into peoples' hands quicker. The Hunger Games was a huge hit and will be on BluRay within about 5 months of its theatrical release. It'll be out on iTunes at the same time.
Historically, this is a vast improvement. Titanic took about 10 months to go from theater to VHS. This was back in the day when places like Blockbuster had exclusive rental windows for a while too, so it was more like a year before non-pirates could purchase it for home use.
If people could reliably pirate high fidelity copies of movies between the theater and DVD releases, I suspect that timing would shrink even further.