‘Revenant,’ ‘Hateful Eight’ Screeners Leak to Huge Piracy Before Theatrical Release

[Thakur]

“The Hateful Eight” and “The Revenant” have leaked to piracy sites after screeners were sent to voters for awards consideration, according to data issued .Both films were slated for a Christmas Day release.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Revenant” is being plundered by pirates at the fastest rate; having attracted over 739,580 unique IP addresses downloading the film in the last 24 hours. Quentin Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” drew 569,153 IP addresses, while “Creed,” which is already in theaters, rounded out the top three most popular torrents of the last day with 499,082.

This is yet another roadblock for Tarantino, whose “Hateful Eight” script leaked online last year, almost killing the bloody Western entirely.

Fox, Weinstein Co. and Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other Oscar contenders made available online illegally in the past few days include Jennifer Lawrence’s “Joy,” Michael Fassbender’s 
“Steve Jobs,” Cate Blanchett’s “Carol,” Brie Larson’s “Room,” Tom Hardy’s “Legend,” Chris Hemsworth’s “In the Heart of the Sea” and Saoirse Ronan’s “Brooklyn.”

Hive-CM8 is one of the piracy groups taking credit for the leaks.

“DVDScreener 1 of 40. Will do them all one after each other, started with the hottest title of this year, the rest will follow,” Hive-CM8 said after posting “Hateful Eight” online. According to TorrentFreak, the illegal copy of the film is “extremely clean and free from timestamps.”

This has become common in piracy circles in recent years during “Oscar screener season.” Ellen DeGeneres, last year’s Academy Awards host, was linked to a leaked screener of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” The pirated copy of the Ben Stiller dramedy that surfaced on file-sharing pirate networks in January 2014 included a watermark with “Ellen DeGeneres.”

More recently, “The Expendables 3” — a Sylvester Stallone-starrer — leaked online three weeks ahead of the U.S. premiere, hurting its box office potential.

After the “Game of Thrones” season five premiere wound up online this summer from an advance DVD screener, HBO shifted to a streaming-only policy for advance reviews following years of mailing out DVDs to critics and journalists.