Give in to the temptation of clicking and watching, that is.
Of course, this is no longer a problem if you’ve already seen it on the first day of screening. Word on the street is that it’s been a difficult task getting tickets going into the weekend because they’ve been booked well ahead.
If you haven’t, then the fact that illegal copies have already made their way on torrent sites must be a considerable annoyance. Reports say that hours after the Asian premiere of Avengers: Endgame, a copy of Chinese origin popped up on the net. Other reports say India got theirs a day before the UK premiere. It was a full day of joyful piracy before the movie was scheduled for its US release.
But maybe you shouldn’t be annoyed. The copies so far have been terrible. Mostly they appear to be phone-cam shots that are badly angled. (How they shot the entire movie holding up that phone is a physical challenge in itself). We’ve read in some comments section that in a few copies you can hear a person sniffling, indicating said person has a bad cold. Still other copies have Arabic subtitles. In general they are clearly trash.
Word on the street—again, but this one leading up to the Greenhills tiangges—is that no one is bothering with these bad pirated copies. It’s going to take, at best, about six weeks before HD quality copies begin to appear, and that’s when the selling begins.
So what purpose do these copies serve?
They don’t seem like the textbook definition of a spoiler, even though this has been the operative word to describe anything that preempts your enjoying the movie in cinemas. Spoilers are bits of info revealed to you that you can’t unsee, hence “spoiling” your anticipation; mostly they are beyond your control (reason for the dire warning of deactivating your social media to save yourself from any more harm). The links to the illegal copies don’t reveal anything—you have full control of watching or not watching it, or whether to share it or not.
For those who uploaded this early, we don’t think they were out to make a quick buck from it. No one buys shit like that anymore. So we can only guess they were after bragging rights, or a way to one-up the system (because they were, after all, committing a crime—for three hours!), or just to be annoying. If it was a contribution to the vast content of the Internet, then it’s a contribution we can easily ignore.
Still, others say the copy was clear enough to be digestible. So maybe it was really done for you who really have no way of seeing the movie, or don’t want to spend for it. Are the early pirares doing you a favor? No. The ones who will give you an HD copy will.
Which makes us wonder if the cachet of Avengers: Endgame, a movie bound to make blockbuster history, can somehow stir up enough concern about piracy to change current policies—a policy of can’t-control, really. Somehow, we don’t think so. Waiting for movies, or a hit series, on torrent sites is now part of daily routine. In this sense, we can agree with people who were confused with all the furor surrounding Endgame—it’s just a movie you download in a couple of weeks.
It’s out there. It probably was shared to you just now. So will you or won’t you?
(Update: As this story develops, we received a tip that A8, V8 copies have now been set loose on torrent sites. In torrent speak, "A" means audio and "V" means video, and the number is a scale from 1-10 to indicate quality—so the ratings mean good ones must really now be out there.)