It’s awards season once again, and you know what that means! Screeners get sent out to all the Hollywood bigwigs, end up in the hands of pirates, and all of a sudden — new releases start showing up on torrent sites. Sometimes these rips end up online before a movie even gets a full theater release, which is what happened to The Hateful Eight.
Quentin Tarantino’s latest Western was set to release on Christmas day, but pirate group Hive-CM8 managed to get a copy of it online by Dec. 23. An investigation seemed to implicate a Point Break executive producer, but the mysterious people behind Hive-CM8 have released a statement on that, as well as an apology of sorts to Tarantino, according to The Hollywood Reporter:
Sorry to disappoint M but there was no hack or any such thing. We got the copies sold from a guy on the street, no decryption was needed. we were definately not the only ones. cpl other movies have been on the net days before, not done from us So we wanted to share this movies with the people who are not rich enough or not able to watch all nominated movies in the cinema.
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We feel sorry for the trouble we caused by releasing that great movie before cinedate even has begun. we never intended to hurt anyone by doing that, we didnt know it would get that popular that quickly
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Since everyone is now talking about this movie we dont think the producers will loose any money at cinedate, and we tell you now why. we actually think this has created a new type of media hype that is more present in the news, radio and in the papers than starwars, and the promotional costs for this were free
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sorry it was around christmas we didnt plan that at all either, we wont do another movie before its cinedate, and we def wont go up to 40 as planned, we think we have done enough already.cheers
So, from Hive-CM8’s point of view, no one was talking about The Hateful Eight until they caused a stir by releasing it early. But thanks to their heroic actions, Tarantino and the Weinstein Company have a chance to make their money back because the torrent has been so popular. However, they won’t release any more movies before their release dates, because… they don’t want to help other movies out like this?
It’s all rather confusing and somewhat contradictory, though not that surprising. There’s a certain amount of moral and mental gymnastics going on whenever anyone illegally downloads or streams something, and it seems like that carries all the way to the top of the pirate chain to those who hunt down and release black market screeners. I’d admonish them for their actions, but let he who has never downloaded a torrent cast the first stone.
(via The Hollywood Reporter)
