It has hit the Domain News this week that Warner Bro's are fighting to recover a number of domains that have been registered surrounding the next instalment of their comedy blockbuster The Hangover. The second movie in the series grossed $200 million at the box office in its first five days after release, and shortly afterwards the director revealed plans for a third movie in the franchise.

Possibly pre-empting eager domainers everywhere registering more Hangover 3 domains, Warner Bro's quickly registered Hangover3movie.com, HangoverMovie3.com, Hangover-3.com, the-hangover-3.com, and theHangoverMovie3.com back in June. Unfortunately for them though, the domains thehangoverpart3.com, hangoverpart3.com and hangover3.com were already registered – Seems at least one person saw the value of the domains before Warner Bro's did!

Warner Brothers have decided to use official channels to try to recover the domains, and have approached the National Arbitration Forum to try and win back the domain names without directly approaching the registrant. Currently all three domains are owned by a gentleman in Washington D.C. – or at least they are for the moment.

But is it ever worthwhile for a movie studio to pay mega bucks to buy these domains retrospectively as premiums, or stump up the costs to cover a dispute? Personally I don’t think it is, as I can count the number of times I have visited an official movie website on one hand. I favour review sites and YouTube to watch trailers and find out what others are saying about a movie, rather than visiting an official channel which is essentially just a marketing campaign. I also wonder whether these sites are really maintained after the DVD is released and the buzz of the movie has died down.

As a regular cinema goer I often notice the URLs that are advertised on movie trailers which almost look like afterthoughts. Some examples: Paranormal Activity 3, paranormalmovie.com. We Are Marshall, wearemarshall-themovie.warnerbros.com. Knocked Up, universalstudiosentertainment.com/knocked-up/. And my personal favourite: The Da Vinci Code, sodarktheconofman.com (an obscure quote from the book that makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t memorised it whilst reading!). The rule of thumb seems to be, add the word “movie” and perhaps a hyphen… If not, don’t bother registering a domain at all and use a sneaky subdomain or subdirectory.

So it certainly seems that the movie industry shares my view. If you can get the domain name for around the $10 mark, brilliant, if not simply pursue an alternative solution!

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