Movie industry experts talk about how the window where a film plays exclusively in theatrers keep getting shorter and shorter. Where it used to take months for something to go from the theater to home video, now it often takes a matter of weeks. But what’s happening to the Jason Statham movie Mutiny is just ridiculous.
Just about every major movie that hits theaters gets its own page on digital retailers like Amazon while it’s still in multiplexes. That’s because companies like Amazon want to be able to sell pre-orders for the film’s eventual home release while the buzz around a title is still at its highest. (There’s already an Amazon page for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, for example, even though Sony has yet to even announce when it will be available for digital rental or purchse.)
That’s how things are supposed to go. But this week, the Amazon page for the Jason Statham vehicle Mutiny somehow wound up with the actual movie — and it was made available to stream for free. According to Deadline “the movie was up for a matter of hours earlier this week after a mistake led to it being posted on Prime’s product detail page that typically shows trailers.”
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During the time it was up, users were able to watch the film. And once people can watch something online, that means someone is going to pirate it — a particularly unfortunate and potentially damaging situation for a title like Mutiny that is just starting to open in theaters around the country. (In some territories, Mutiny isn’t scheduled to open for a while.)
Deadline’s report claims that Lionsgate’s anti-piracy team is “trying to mitigate the damage,” but you know what they say about a horse once it’s already out of the barn. They also quote one “fuming international buyer” who called this an “unprecedented situation” and “a major f— up … this is a multimillion-dollar problem for Amazon, and buyers will expect a check to be written to help resolve this.” Yikes.
In Mutiny, Statham plays a man framed for his boss’ murder, “leaving him on the run as he works to uncover an international conspiracy.”
Despite this leak, if you want to see Mutiny in theaters you can right now. I’m sure Lionsgate would very much appreciate it if you did.
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