Despite Disney’s Best Efforts, ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Blu-ray Leaks Online
The gap between a movie’s theater and home releases is shorter than ever – but this hasn’t stopped more than a quarter of a million people downloading a pirate copy of Star Wars: The Force Awakens over the last two days.
The film was released in cinemas on December 18, and will become officially available for download on April 1,and on Blu-ray and DVD four days later. However, it appears many people can’t wait until then.
NEW YORK, NY – DECEMBER 17: A poster is shown to promote the new hit ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ at Regal Cinemas in Union Square on December 17, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Ben Gabbe/Getty Images)
Within hours of the leaked version appearing, it was one of the most-shared files on The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents, and there are dozens of copies posted elsewhere too.
The first was posted by the REPLiCA piracy group and, says TorrentFreak, appears to be a normal retail copy – all the previous pirated versions doing the rounds over recent weeks have been made in cinemas using handheld recorders.
Disney and Lucasfilm have been cracking down on piracy hard, with tens of thousands of takedown requests made over Star Wars: The Force Awakens alone. No screeners were made for the film – saving it from the massive leak of movies including The Hateful Eight, Spectre and The Revenant made by piracy release group Hive-CM8 at the end of last year.
Disoney even filed a takedown notice on Facebook and Twitter forcing them to pull a photograph of an action figure bought at a Walmart store and posted on a fan site.
It remains to be seen whether the leak will affect retail sales to any significant degree. The official Blu-ray is set to contain additional material, including an hour-long behind-the-scenes documentary, that’s missing from the pirated version. Many die-hard fans wouldn’t dream of living without it – or without the full set of Blu-ray disk boxes sitting proudly on their shelves.