It’s been a month since the new聽Avatar movie leaked online, and in that month Paramount has only been quiet about its approach to trying to quell the leak’s spread (and quieter still about how it is promoting a movie that’s meant to be out in five months, but that’s par for the course with it and聽Avatar). But now the studio has an even weirder headache to consider: people are taking the leaked movie and burning it to Blu-ray discs for sale.
Although Paramount has refused to publicly comment on the leaks of聽Legend of Aang, choosing instead to hit leaked clips and releases of the Avatar Studios film through copyright takedowns, the film’s persistence online has taken a new step recently, as multiple Blu-ray copies of the movie have started being listed for sale on eBay.
A cursory search for new listings under “Legend of Aang” on the auction site shows that, aside from the occasional copy of the PS2-era video game of the same name (at least, as it was known in Europe; elsewhere it was simply Avatar: The Last Airbender), in the past week multiple listings of what claim to be Blu-ray copies of the upcoming film are already being sold online, mostly from sellers in Asia.
While these are, in all likelihood, simply people who have downloaded the leaked film and burned it to disc, there is something so utterly absurd about all of this beyond the fact that聽Legend of Aang is now one of the most embarrassing leaks Paramount has faced in years. The studio has done so little to promote the upcoming movie, outside of pulling it from theaters to instead debut on streaming, that not only are these physical releases being sold in the first place, they’re being advertised with promotional art that Paramount hasn’t even officially released yet鈥攊t’s art that first randomly appeared as apparel designs on Target’s website that has since been removed from sale (they remain online for all to see, however). A movie that is, again, meant to be releasing five months from now!
It truly goes to show that this whole situation is just the latest in a long line of ignominies that Paramount’s management of聽Avatar has led to, and things are probably only going to get weirder from here as we get closer and closer to Legend of Aang‘s official launch on Paramount+ October 9.
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