In what is sure to be the most notorious case of piracy since the early leak of X-Men Origins: Wolverine five years ago, the Sylvester Stallone-led action blockbuster The Expendables 3 has leaked online, weeks before its release and even its world premiere here in London at the start of next month.
The sequel started appearing on torrent sites on Wednesday, with downloads starting to spike yesterday, and piracy analytics estimate that the film had been downloaded 189,052 times as of 6pm ET Thursday, within twenty-four hours of it landing online.
Whereas Origins was a rough copy of the movie, it’s believed that The Expendables 3 is a DVD-quality copy, which is sure to fuel the rate at which it gets downloaded in the coming weeks even further as fans of the franchise clamour to torrent sites to get an early viewing.
A lot of the time, fans don’t want to see handheld camera quality of piracy copies shot in the cinema. By the time the DVD-quality rips roll around, the film has often exited the cinema, and so the damage it does there has a bigger impact on DVD/Blu-ray sales, along with those in the mindset of waiting for the rip rather than going to the cinema.
As you can imagine, then, having a DVD-quality rip land online before the film has even had its world premiere has the potential to seriously damage its box office potential next month.
Production company Nu Image filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit three years ago after The Expendables leaked online, approximately nine months after its theatrical release. Whilst the company eventually withdrew its suit, which targeted more than 23,000 individual BitTorrent users, it shows they’re clearly willing to bring out the lawyers when their money is on the line.
The third instalment in the series sees Stallone joined by new and familiar faces alike, starring alongside Jason Statham, Antonio Banderas, Jet Li, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren, Kelsey Grammer, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Glen Powell, Victor Ortiz, and Robert Davi, with Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Expendables 3 has its world premiere here in London on August 4th, and will be released in the UK on August 14th and in the US on August 15th. If you’re reading this and a small part of you is tempted to see what all the fuss is about, this is just a friendly reminder that the ads that play in front of films and DVDs/Blu-rays are right. Piracy isn’t a victimless crime. And the theatrical success of tentpoles like these has an immeasurable effect on the future of the industry as a whole.
