The inevitable has happened! This year’s most anticipated, most talked about film, ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water‘, has been leaked on torrents and piracy sites in India by anti-social elements. The leak is in keeping with the pattern followed by these piracy sites since so many years – a buzzy film comes up, whether in English, Hindi, Tamil or Telugu; and it’s as clear as day that the film will get leaked on piracy websites.
The piracy menace in India is a scourge that refuses to abate, despite umpteen crackdowns by Indian law enforcement and cyber security agencies. ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ is the latest in a long line of high profile films to be leaked by piracy enablers in India. The versions of ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ playing on these piracy sites such as Tamil Blasters are camera prints shot in theatres, where it played for preview shows.
The pirated versions of ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ have been streaming on piracy and torrent sites since last evening. We at Binged managed to catch hold of a few visuals of the pirated copies of ‘Avatar 2’, and found that some of them are decent, some are extremely bad, but all have one glaring anomaly — the logo of betting sites superimposed in bold on the prints.
Maybe the questionable quality of the pirated versions of ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ will turn viewers off from downloading them for viewing. On the other hand, the steep prices of the tickets to the movie in theatres might serve as a driving factor in pushing people to watch the pirated versions of ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’, instead of spending big bucks in the theatres.
‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ releases in theatres worldwide from tonight. We expect more pirated versions of the film to flood the flourishing piracy market as soon as the film hits theatres in India. The Indian government has been racking its brains to tackle the piracy problem head-on. It has aggressively pushed the Cinematograph Act, 1952 in recent times, even amending the Act to add more teeth to it by way of more severe punishment. But it hardly seems to act as a deterrent.
In the meantime, big and expensive films like ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ suffer losses in a teeming market like India, for no fault of their own.