The people who make their non-living uploading stolen copies of films and TV episodes onto the internet for free generally leave their opinions of said films out of it. But the group responsible for a recent leak of several high-profile theatrical films was so impressed with The Hateful Eight, it felt compelled to apologize and thank director Quentin Tarantino for making it.
The kudos came wrapped in a not-especially-apologetic apology, which Hive-CM8 issued earlier today and is reprinted in full in The Hollywood Reporter. In said predictably misspelled apology, the group says that it is leaving the piracy game without fulfilling its goal of leaking 40 movies, because “we think we have done enough already.” It also says that the DVD screeners it uploaded—at least one of which was ultimately traced back to the office of Hollywood producer Andrew Kosove—were bought from a guy on the street and “there was no hack or any such thing.”
Perfectly encapsulating the convoluted logic used to justify torrenting (because “because I could” just doesn’t cut it), the statement claims that, while it is sorry for what it did, giving away movies for free online actually gets more people into movie theaters:
we actually think this has created a new type of media hype that is more present in the news, radio and in the papers than starwars, and the promotional costs for this were free
If lets say 5% of the people planned to watch this movie at cinemadate, due to this media push we unintenionally created, we believe that now 40% of the people will watch this movie in the cinema cause everyone is talking about it and everyone wants to see the movie that created so much noise. this will push the cinema tickets sale for sure.
we really hope this helped out the producers in the longrun, so that the production costs are covered and more
Anyway, the group is especially regretful of helping The Hateful Eight, because it’s “an excellent, thrilling, and entertaining Western that combines terrific direction, a fantastic cast, a wonderful script, beautiful photography and a memorable score … thx Tarantino for this wonderful movie.” Whether this last bit was written as Tarantino hovered menacingly behind the typist, dictating while idly polishing a samurai sword, remains a mystery. What is clear, however, is anyone who can unite the celluloid snobs and the hardcore torrenters with one film is truly King of the Movie Nerds.
(The Revenant, another film leaked by Hive-CM8, wasn’t mentioned in the apology, because nobody cares about poor, cold Leonardo DiCaprio.)