Pirating the Oscar 2005 Screeners

Last year, I published some not-too-surprising research that revealed all but one Oscar-nominated film leaked onto the Internet. Let’s see if the industry’s evolving efforts to plug the leaks were any more effective this year.

Below is a list of every Oscar-nominated film, excluding foreign language and documentary categories, with the date of US theatrical release and the first date the industry screener was leaked to the Internet. The results? Out of 30 movies, all but five screener copies were leaked online by pirate groups.

How did those five movies manage to stay offline? For “House of Flying Daggers,” the retail DVD was leaked two months before the US theatrical release, bypassing the need for a screener release. For the others, I suspect that either a screener was never released for the film or that the screener was released after the official retail DVD. (In the case of “Phantom of the Opera,” maybe there was no demand.)

A few notes: Three screeners were originally leaked in VHS format, so I listed those dates first. (Note that all three were later leaked in DVD format, also.) Not surprisingly, almost every screener was leaked during the winter months leading up to award nominations. Also of interest, it looks like the screeners for “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Sea Inside” leaked onto the Internet before the film was even released in the United States.

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