The demise of pirate streaming giant Fmovies in June, followed by the closure of Aniwave and more than a dozen others in the space of a few hours Monday night, will be remembered for a very long time.
When the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment modestly confirmed on Thursday it had supported Vietnamese authorities to shut down the sites, the focus was on huge but easily digested numbers. When combined, fmovies, bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer, and aniwave, reportedly drew more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024.
The popularity of these sites obviously made them a target, but significance can also be found elsewhere. For reasons we’re aware of and have reported previously, and likely many more besides, shutting down these sites was never going to be straightforward.
Frustrations date back years but more recently, at the same time domain names were being handed over to the MPA, presumably as part of an agreement, site resurrections were also underway.
The big question is whether Fmovies, Aniwave, and the other sites will attempt something similar.
Giving Up Was Never an Option
Some believed that nothing could be done about the piracy situation in Vietnam in the short term. Both Hollywood and Japan’s major anime studios seemed to have few options left, but that didn’t mean no options at all.
What follows is a sample of events relating to Vietnam that show the type of environment Fmovies and the other sites were up against. To what extent the background to these events affected the outcome, if they did so at all, is hard to quantify. What’s fairly clear is that when business needs are met in a mutually beneficial manner, momentum can take on a life of its own. As part of the overall vision for the Hollywood/Vietnam relationship, the sites’ existence may have simply become untenable.
International Symposium on Copyright Enforcement
As previously reported, Vietnam played host to the International Symposium on Copyright Enforcement starting June 17; those in attendance included the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), Vietnam’s Copyright Office under the Ministry of Culture, the MPA and who’s-who of major rightsholders and specialist anti-piracy companies.
The symposium ended on June 21 and Fmovies reportedly stopped updating June 22/23. One day later, MPA Chairman/CEO Charles Rivkin appeared in a photograph alongside Nguyen Quoc Dzung, Vietnam’s Ambassador to the United States.
Topics discussed over lunch included the importance of Vietnam’s streaming market to the Hollywood studios, and “how to strengthen the bonds between our creative economies and protect the livelihoods of the creative workforce driving this shared growth.”
That was June 24 and just a few hours earlier, Fmovies had suddenly started to fail. On life support for a few days, the world’s most popular streaming site would soon be declared dead.
The obvious beneficiary was Hollywood but as we noted in an earlier report, other meetings were also taking place elsewhere in Vietnam. One event attended by the Vice Chairman of Sony Pictures mentioned potential funding mechanisms for local films.
Vietnam Tourism – Cinema Promotion Program in the United States
Official government documents dated July 2024 show that a “tourism and cinema promotion program” will take place in Los Angeles in the “third and fourth quarters of 2024” with exhibitions on Vietnamese cinema and tourism and a program to “introduce the potential of Vietnam’s cinema scene and policies towards international cinema activities.”
The goals of the program in the United States include the promotion of tourist destinations and potential filming destinations in Vietnam, plus the following:
Attract Hollywood film studios to Vietnam to film movies with great appeal, capable of creating international media attention, to promote and attract tourists to Vietnam.
And there’s more;
– Take advantage of the prestige and influence of Hollywood partners to organize the Program, attract public attention, and widely promote Vietnamese tourism. Promote tourism promotion through cinema, effectively exploit tourism from cinema, and create a breakthrough in tourism promotion.
– Introduce the image and brand of friendly, quality, and sustainable Vietnamese tourism destinations. Create opportunities for Vietnamese tourism service providers to meet and connect with US businesses and partners.
– Strengthening cooperation and exchange; promoting the signing and commitment to effectively implementing cooperation agreements on tourism and cinema between relevant agencies, localities, Vietnamese enterprises and US partners, contributing to concretizing and deepening tourism and cinema cooperation between the two countries.
– Contact, exchange and work with a number of US tourism and film organizations (US Travel Association, Motion Picture Association of America), a number of large tourism corporations and businesses, media corporations, airlines, cruise lines, and relevant US partners to promote cooperation in tourism and film development.
The documents suggest that the MPA agreed to ensure that producers, studio directors, directors, film set directors, and Hollywood stars, attend a special event on an unspecified date. The MPA was asked to make a speech on the same day.
Japanese Animation Movie Screening
As part of the 2024 Japan-Vietnam Copyright Cooperation Project, a meeting took place on July 23, 2024, between staff from the Copyright Office of Vietnam, Japanese publishers, and anti-piracy group CODA.
After a presentation, those in attendance took part in a “lively discussion, during which participants exchanged views on topics such as the Vietnamese government’s anti-piracy measures, cooperation with copyright awareness activities, and Vietnam’s intellectual property laws and their implementation.”
Another Vietnamese government document dated May 2024, details “The organization of the Program ‘Japanese Animation Film Screening’.”
If everything went according to plan, that event took place on Friday, August 23, 2024. Coincidentally or not, the world’s largest anime piracy site Aniwave closed down on August 26, just three days later.
What kind of effect the closure will have on the local anime market is unclear, but for Vietnam’s Beta Media and Japan’s Aeon Entertainment, any reduction in availability of pirated content will be considered good news.
On July 31, the partnership committed to building more than 50 premium cinema complexes across Vietnam under the Aeon Beta Cinema brand by 2035. The first is scheduled to open in 2025 and with overall investment reported as “tens of billions” of yen (one billion yen currently US$64.4 million), confidence in Vietnam’s cinema business seems fairly high right now.
Momentum Builds Pressure
These events are just a few examples of recent activity in Vietnam; when combined, they show that despite the existence of Fmovies, bridge building work has never stopped. Indeed, after U.S. President Joe Biden met with Nguyen Phu Trong, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee, in Hanoi last September, forging closer ties is expected under the U.S.–Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
General reports and details of progress were reported several times in June; Daniel J. Kritenbrink, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, spent June 21/22 in Hanoi where he met senior government officials. On June 25, with Fmovies drifting away in the background, Jose W. Fernandez, Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, welcomed Vietnam’s Minister of Planning and Investment, Nguyen Chi Dung, to Washington, D.C.
Surfacing Anytime Soon Would Be….Complicated
On balance then, it seems fairly unlikely that Fmovies2 will debut anytime soon. With Hollywood pulling and pushing in the same direction as Vietnam, whatever appears on the table can be obtained or achieved much more easily. That’s something that money can’t buy, at least not directly. Transactions like these often find themselves settled through the bank of goodwill instead.
If pushed to highlight a negative, Vietnamese media reports on Fmovies’ demise seem limited to repeating what has already been reported in Western media. At least far as we can determine, government officials and the police have made no official comments. Government websites, which include news resources, haven’t reported the news at all.
Two people were indeed arrested, but nobody has yet been charged. ACE, meanwhile, has a local trademark application underway; all fingers will be crossed that moving forward, any use for it will be strictly limited.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
