Although it had been on the radar of Grindhouse movie fans for some time, Hobo With a Shotgun can hardly be called mainstream material. With its (albeit intentional) B-movie acting, storyline and bucket loads of gore, it was only really expected to appeal to dedicated followers of the genre.
Earlier this month, however, something interesting began to happen. Following Hobo’s 1st April VOD release (it won’t be out in theaters until the first week of May) an unofficial copy hit BitTorrent networks and within days it had reached No.13 in The Pirate Bay’s list of most downloaded movies.
This prompted director Jason Eisener to enter the discussion and, as we reported, he initially asked people not to download the movie.
But news of a super-entertaining movie travels fast and eventually Eisener crossed his fingers and resigned himself to possibility that all the publicity might be good for the movie. It was sitting at position No.252 IMDb’s Weekly MOVIEmeter – could that improve?
Yes, absolutely.
Just 10 days later and against some massive competition, Hobo With a Shotgun has now blasted up the IMDb’s Weekly MOVIEmeter ratings to an amazing position No.9, only one place behind Limitless and two behind Battle: Los Angeles.
I wanted to include some official viewing links in this article for this movie but unfortunately, Amazon link aside, Google searches just had me going round in circles. Not even the movie’s official site could point me in the right direction, which to me seems absolutely ridiculous.
Official ways to access stuff should be right there in your face or people get sick of searching and end up at The Pirate Bay and other unofficial outlets. The addition of simple ‘WATCH NOW!!’ links on the official site would suffice.
Magnolia Pictures did find time to speak to the Web Sheriff though, who according to missing Google results, appears to have taken down some Hobo links.
He’s got a long way to go though. According to stats collated by TorrentFreak for our weekly Top 10 Most Downloaded Movies chart, Hobo With a Shotgun has already been downloaded around 150,000 times on BitTorrent.
