Lionsgate may be in a lot of trouble in the upcoming weeks as their latest film, The Expendables 3, has leaked online three weeks prior to its release.
The major action film starring actors such as Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford was leaked onto various BitTorrent piracy sites on Wednesday and in the 24-hours been downloaded 189,000 times, reports Variety.
This situation is a large issue for the film, as the target audience is young males and that audience primarily uses piracy sites. There are three weeks left until the film hits theaters and by then the movie will hit the millions for the amount of downloads completed.
This is not the first time something like this has happened, as X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked onto megaupload.com back in 2008. Twenteth Century Fox estimated that tens of millions of dollars were lost from the 15 million people who downloaded the film.
Yet, the real question is who uploaded the film, as the copy is not a standard bootleg, but was taken from a DVD screener, reports Entertainment Weekly. This format usually comes from the distributor and given over to the media prior to its release. It just may be impossible to track down who is behind the operation as TorrentFreak, a site dedicated to file sharing, claims it has worked its way back to something known as “Drarbg,” which could be one person or a group.
There is no way to tell if Lionsgate will be able to recover, as this may become the series lowest grossing film, as the first movie earned nearly $275 million worldwide and the sequel went even higher with over $300 million.
Image courtesy of Dara Kushner/INFphoto.com