'Expendables 3' Leaks Online Weeks Before Release Date: 150,000+ Torrent Copies In 24 Hours

While the cast Expendables 3 is busy promoting the newest installment of the franchise at Comic-Con this week, a pirated copy has leaked online and has already been downloaded close to 200,000 times in 24 hours.

Expendables 3 is the latest in a series of all-star action movies starring Hollywood heavy hitters Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Jason Statham and Jet Li.

With the film not scheduled to premiere for another three weeks, Lionsgate may take a massive financial hit. (The first Expendables installment grossed nearly $275 million worldwide in 2012, the sequel, Expendables 2, grossed over $300 million two years later.)

While movies are often leaked online, the quality of this one is unusually high, and is believed to have been taken directly from a DVD screener-while are given to media figures ahead of the film's theatrical release.

The leak occurred via BitTorrent which will make finding the perpetrator difficult due to its "decentralized nature" and because of the pseudonyms frequently used on piracy websites.
Filesharing blog, TorrentFreak.com thinks it has traced the culprit. They report, "the initial and most popular copy appears to be attributable to an entity known as 'Drarbg.'

Drarbg has accounts on several major torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay, and is one of the most prolific BitTorrent releasers online today. Many presume that this is a single person, but Drarbg has previously indicated that it's a group of individuals working together as a team. Drarbg, as the name suggests, has affiliations with RARBG, a popular public torrent site."