All Major Oscar Contenders Leaked on Pirate Sites

The Oscars is the most watched award show of the year, closely followed by hundreds of millions of movie fans around the world.

A few days ago the 2016 nominees were announced and as usual this triggered a spike in interest from box office visitors as well as online pirates.

The latter group has been spoiled with a steady supply of pirated titles over the past several weeks. Ironically, many of these titles leaked from DVD screener copies which were sent out to reviewers, including Academy members who vote for the Oscars.

Inspired by the work of Andy Baio early 2015, we decided to take a look at this year’s contenders, excluding short and foreign films, to see how many films are already available on pirate sites.

To our surprise, all of the 37 nominated movies are widely available through unauthorized sites. Most are released in Blu-Ray or DVD quality, including several DVD screeners.

The list of leaked movies includes Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is the only movie that’s not available in a decent quality. The only copies of the blockbuster are so-called “Cams,” recorded in the theater.

Due to the low quality the number of Star Wars downloads pales in comparison to other nominees such as The Big Short and The Martian, which have both been downloaded millions of times.

Of all movies that leaked 17 were sourced from DVD screeners. This number of leaked nominee screeners is a record high for this decade.

In recent years the number of leaked screener copies was significantly deceased due to increased security measures. However, this trends was broken this year thanks to Hive-CM8, who released 14 screeners last month.

It’s unclear whether these screeners were intended for the Oscars or another award show.

Below this article we’ve included an overview of all the nominees, whether the films were leaked as a DVD screener, as well as the highest quality leak format in which they are currently available.