I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers.
Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.
I don't want to name-drop, but I could point you to a film with multiple award (including Oscar) nominations that failed to break even and which led to investors dropping out from future projects - but which are hugely popular on file-sharing sites, with many thousands of seeders & leechers over a year after release despite the availability of the film on Netflix.
And please don't bring up 'Hollywood accounting.' This is based on personal acquaintance with executive producers at a large production company who personally lost millions of dollars, not some dentist in Pomona who wasn't able to buy a new Mercedes. That made it a lot more difficult for the director to place the next project - which I also anticipate will be Oscar-nominated - and required working with a much lower budget. That film is dying even more horribly at the box office (because there was no marketing budget worth speaking of) but it's one of the hottest torrents. Explain that to me, how a film can't get a wide release and therefore deserves to fail even though there are over 4000 people downloading it according to a popular tracker.
So while people at the top end of Hollywood obviously have things way better than people making no-budget films (sub $1 million) and don't have to worry about day-to-day costs of living, yes, there are people losing really substantial amounts of money and extremely high-quality directors that are having trouble raising money to make films despite their work being among the most popular movie torrents.