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Piracy hurt Disney’s Mulan in China in 1999, and it appears to be happening again
- Mulan was downloaded more than 400,000 times and uploaded to illegal streaming sites ahead of its cinematic debut in China
- Disney’s animated Mulan was widely available on pirated discs when it was released in China in 1999, nearly a year late
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When Disney’s animated musical Mulan was released in China in early 1999, nine months had passed since its international debut. Pirated copies of the film were widely available on disc by that point, and the film famously flopped in the country. Now, it looks like history might be repeating itself.
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Disney’s live-action remake of the film, also titled Mulan, was the most pirated movie in the world during its first weekend online, according to data from iknowwhatyoudownload.com. The film was put up on the Disney+ streaming platform in the US and a handful of other markets on Friday, September 4, and became widely available on pirate sites within an hour of going live.
In China alone, Mulan was downloaded more than 250,000 times over the peer-to-peer downloading protocol BitTorrent by that Sunday. And that is likely just the tip of the iceberg as illicit streaming sites and downloads from cloud platforms like Baidu Wangpan are more difficult to track. Several streaming sites known for pirated content had Mulan up within a day of its release.
This might be troubling for Disney, but Mulan did not exactly flop in China when it opened in cinemas this past weekend. It topped China’s box office with an estimated US$23.2 million while cinemas are operating at half capacity as they try to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
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