Do you remember a few years ago when Twitter, the platform currently known as X, had users leaking movies, including Super Mario Bros. and Avatar: The Way of Water? Well, you’re not gonna believe this, but…
Over the Easter weekend users have done the same thing with the just-released Super Mario Galaxy Movie and last year’s Avatar: Fire & Ash. At time of writing, several camcorder rips of the former dropped on Friday and Saturday, with one replacing others taken down by copyright. At time of writing, io9 has only spotted one Fire & Ash video, which is in a perfectly clear quality.
As with last time around, this all thanks to Twitter Blue, aka X Premium, whose benefits include video uploading up to three hours long. (Despite a 3-hour and 17-minute runtime, Ash makes up a single post, credits included, while uploaders cut off Galaxy’s credits.) It’s currently unclear how many views either movie’s gotten since they were put online—for reference, the first Super Mario reportedly had over nine million views when it was leaked in April 2023. By the time this had happened, Nintendo and Illumination’s movie had crossed the $1 billion benchmark that same weekend.
It’s going to be a while before The Super Mario Galaxy Movie leaves theaters, but in the case of Avatar: Fire & Ash, it’d just gone digital at the end of March. When Way of Water leaked, it’d been on digital storefronts for just over a month. Presumably by the time we get Avatar 4, leakers will have managed to put it on Twitter by opening weekend as they’ve done with Mario Galaxy. This probably won’t be the end of Twitter’s leaks—after all, Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three are due during the holidays.
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