The indie studio’s latest movie, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, was only released two short weeks ago but already a high-definition copy has surfaced online, becoming the most downloaded movie of the week.
While it hasn’t been a great summer at the American box office so far, the action comedy did succeed in topping the charts for two weeks in a row, earning just north of $60 million so far. Yet, that number might not go much further if viewers opt to rather just stream or download the film than pay for it.
It’s true that new movies leak almost every day onto piracy and illegal streaming sites, but it’s very unusual for a movie to leak just a few days after the theatrical release. If that isn’t enough, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, costing $30 million to produce and stars Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, is yet to be released in some major overseas territories like Australia, Norway and China.
Even die-hard pirates were surprised to see the movie on their favourite sites. “Wait, what?” quips one downloader on a well-known torrent hosting site, with another adding: “How did you do this magic?” One downloader from France was especially ecstatic: “OK, this was nothing short of perfection. 8 days post theatrical release… perfect 1080p clarity… no hard coded subs… English translation AND full English subs…Does it get any better?”
While the source of the leak isn’t immediately clear, some downloaders noted that the movie is already available on Netflix in Japan. A quick internet search proved this to be correct. And since the high-definition file is labelled “Web-DL”, it’s fairly safe to assume it was ripped from a streaming service.
A double whammy
Adding to the filmmakers’ sorrow is the fact that this isn’t the first time director Patrick Hughes suffers a major leak in his career. The Australian filmmaker also directed the third entry in Sylvester Stallone’s popular Expendables series in 2014. That movie famously suffered the same fate, just more severe. Three weeks before The Expendables 3 was released in cinemas, a DVD-quality illegal leak was released online and downloaded more than 180,000 times within 24 hours. After one week that number grew to more than 2 million.
Lionsgate, the studio behind the series, went into overdrive to try and smoke out the culprit (or culprits) responsible. The studio reported that a single digital copy of the film was stolen from their servers and uploaded to the internet. Soon after, Lionsgate filed a lawsuit in California federal court against ten anonymous individuals for copyright infringement and sent demand letters to a further six operators of illegal download sites but received no reply. It wasn’t until a year later that they reached an out of court settlement with one of the download sites, Played.to. While the details of the settlement are unknown, the site appears to be down unless it moved to a new domain.
Now that another of Patrick Hughes’ films have leaked, it’s expected that Millennium Films will follow much the same route to try and mitigate the damage caused so far. The studio is known for its aggressive stance against piracy in recent years, even going so far as to demand automated cash settlements and fines from alleged BitTorrent pirates.
Luckily though, The Hitman’s Bodyguard has already proved to be profitable. Just how profitable it will end up being, remains to be seen. Until then, independent film studios like Millennium Films should continue to focus on protecting their content from the threat of piracy by using secure distribution platforms like Screener Copy. This type of software is especially effective in helping studios pinpoint the source of a leak so that the culprit can be removed from their distribution network altogether.
