14 DAY TRIAL // The “Expendables 3” isn’t even out yet, with a release date of August 15 in the United States, but the movie is already on the world’s torrent sites.
According to TorrentFreak, in just 12 hours after the movie reached the Internet, there were some 100,000 copies already downloaded. The interesting part is that this is a rather high-quality copy that is very near the one found on DVDs.
Usually, movies hit the Internet with some delay. At the very least, the film has to be in cinemas somewhere before people start recording it in the movie theater. Then, the better quality copies start popping up online, but this regularly takes quite a bit of time to do.
This is why the situation of “Expendables 3” is a rather strange occurrence and a noteworthy leak that will likely garner some in-house investigations to locate whomever is guilty for putting the copy online.
The plan, as with most other similar movies, is to have the movie successful in movie theaters and then start distributing it via DVDs. With a cast such as the one in this movie (Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Dolph Lundgren, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford and more), it was bound to be quite popular in cinemas.
And it will still be one of the best grossing movies of the summer, despite all the downloads that the torrents are going to attract.
As mentioned, there have already been more than 100,000 downloads of what is presumed to be a DVD screener using BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay lists over 30 copies, and thousands of downloads, as well as plenty of active seeders. It seems that at one point there was even an excess of 65,000 users transferring the torrent.
The distributing studio, Lionsgate, is likely going to make a big comment about the situation and threaten people with lawsuits. As a warning to all those who want to see the movie ahead of time, they should know that some people actually did end up in court for downloading movies from the franchise in previous years.
It is unclear at this point who may be to blame here, but TorrentFreak reports that all roads seem to lead to Drarbg, who made the initial upload. This individual is responsible for plenty of movies reaching the internet, with accounts on several BitTorrent sites out there.
