The Torrent That Would Not Die »
I'll typically keep an eye on the BitTorrent tracker sites such as The Pirate Bay and btjunkie.org, just to see what's popular day in and day out. It's actually an interesting process, though there can really be a lot of junk to wade through (one way to help with this is to create a Yahoo! Pipe to filter some of the data).
In any case, on June 15 of this year, Rise of the Silver Surfer - the sequel to Fantastic Four - was released in theaters. A day or two before that, the movie was released as a torrent. Since then, with very few exceptions, this movie simply will not go away. With the DVD set for release in about a month, it's now time for the DVD rips to start hitting, so I suspect that we'll start seeing those soon.
Now it isn't abnormal for a movie - just about any movie - to be released in torrent form anywhere from a day or two to a week before it is released in theaters. Though this can be a screener DVD or some kind, it is more often a "cam" release, where there is some bozo sitting in a theater filming the movie on the screen. The sound is bad, the picture is bad, and - if you're really lucky - you may even get a shot of one or more people heading to the snack bar or bathroom during the movie. At least with a screener DVD, you get a message about how it belongs to some studio or another.
But what is really odd is the fact that this movie has been out, almost non-stop, for so long.
If the first release came out in mid-June, we're now looking at over two months of releases of this same movie, and there's no end in sight! Usually after those first couple of releases, you'll see nothing more until the DVD hits the streets (usually shortly before, as people try and beat the official release). But from mid-June until late July, I don't think there was a single day that went by where I didn't see at least one posting of this movie.
Then it was a bit hit-and-miss for a couple of days, but then it picked up again, and died down again, and now it seems to be picking up again - a month seems a bit early for it to be the pre-release of the DVD, but perhaps not. Does anyone know why this movie is so popular as a torrent?
