New movies get leaked and people share them on BitTorrent or whatnot. But how do they get out in the first place? People have been sharing digital music for decades but someone has to buy it first. But with new movies, you can’t buy them at all. How does it get leaked? Unscrupulous industry employees? Hacking/theft?
Typically, from screeners sent to reviewers and other industry personnel - even other studio executives.
The process of delivering finished files and masters to disc manufacturing has leaks, too.
The overwhelming majority of movies are not leaked in a high quality format. Usually, a small amount of copies (between 1 and 4) are filmed in movie theaters, often overseas. If the audio isn’t in English, English audio will be recorded in a different theatre and synced to the overseas video copy. A variety of groups try their hand at adjusting the shakiness, bluriness, colors, and brightness of the camera copy. A few months later, the DVD will be released, and pirates will buy the DVD and upload the video to file-sharing networks. Sometimes, but not always, pirated DVD copies will be leaked a few days before the DVD is available for general consumption. This is a consequence of store employees buying, stealing or selling DVD copies before the official release date.
One rare occasions, a DVD screener will be leaked to file-sharing sites. This is a DVD copy of the film the movie industry releases to industry insiders for their personal viewing. These copies are infrequently leaked because DVD screeners are heavily watermarked and the movie industry can easily figure out who leaked the DVD screener. This person will be in a world of trouble, obviously.
There are a few other fringe cases, like R6 copies and Telecine copies, but these have always been rare and have grown even more infrequent in recent years.
Yeah, the grand majority of still in theaters movies you see for download are cam jobs of very low quality, it isn’t until the dvds are ready to come out that you see real leaks.
I’ve heard of low-quality copies recorded on a handheld camera, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Just as an example, my son has a friend who loaned him a hard drive with DVD-quality movies on it. I saw the drive sitting around the house and plugged it in to see what was on it. One of them is Ex Machina, still in theaters. (I don’t know where the friend got the files.) That’s what triggered me to ask the question.
Most (many, almost all?) films are digital. I’m guessing a theater employee cracked whatever protection they have.
This is only anecdotal, I don’t know how theater projectors work but…
I have an online friend who lives in Hong Kong. His roommate has pirated movies in the past. He said all the roommate had to do was bribe a projectionist at a theater to let him in the booth and the projectors had a USB port to plug his camera into.
DVD and Blu-Ray copies of Ex Machina are available on file-sharing networks. These were most likely derived from stolen (or “acquired”) retail copies. This sort of thing (high-quality copies of films available while the film is still in theatre) is uncommon.