Here’s a bit of a strange one. Sony Pictures Entertainment suffered a hack to their corporate servers on November 24th. The hackers threatened to release “secrets” about the company to the public and included a picture of a skeleton with the phrase “Hacked by #GOP” on it. Already that is strange. And criminal.
Well, if that wasn’t bad enough for Sony, screeners of several of their films have been leaked onto the Internet and made their way onto various torrent websites. Among the films leaked are David Ayer‘s tank film Fury, the updated musical Annie, and Oscar hopefuls Still Alice and Mr. Turner. Yeah, if I were Sony, I would be pretty furious about this and want to find out who is responsible immediately.
Fury has been the biggest attraction for online torrenters, being downloaded an astounding 1.2 million times, making it one of the most downloaded movies currently being pirated. The other films are not as big of draws, with Annie at around 206,000 and Still Alice at 103,832 as of now. But these numbers are continuing to grow at a pretty rapid pace.
I do not know enough about hacking to know how this could have happened. I actually know nothing about it. All I can hope is Sony figures out who did this as quick as possibly, because this sort of stuff really bothers me. Torrent culture is bad enough, and when things like this happen, it will just be another incentive for people to stay at home and not go support the film industry. Theater attendance is dwindling, and people will do anything to stay at home, even download stolen material. It is frustrating.
Original report from Variety.
