James Delahunty
6 Dec 2004 8:37
After a very successful year last year, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, has even more success to look forward to with the upcoming release of the Special Extended DVD Edition. The Extended DVD Edition has 50 extra minutes of scenes that were cut from the original theatrical version, including the last confrontation between Saruman and the Fellowship, a very important part of the Lord of the Rings story. However, days ago people could download the movie for free from the Internet when a 2GB XviD copy of the movie appeared online. Today, to follow the XviD copy is a much higher quality DVD release of this movie.
It's not a big thing anymore to see major releases like this leak onto the Internet. I decided to investigate a bit and see what the general attitude is towards the early leak of this movie is. The result is quite amazing, in almost all sites where downloader’s were allowed to comment, they either said they were going to download the movie and later buy the 4Disc DVD retail version or not download it and wait for its release date. The retail set will contain 4 DVD's packed full of bonus material, whereas the copy of it floating around online is only 2 DVD-5's, where the video has been re-encoded to shrink the overall size.
Many people (including myself) are eagerly awaiting this version of the movie and its not a surprise that the numbers currently downloading and sharing it are in the thousands. It will be interesting to see any comments from the movie studios about the leak. I'm sure they should have nothing to worry about as more people would rather buy this version than download it, so I'd doubt that this early leak and download craze will damage the sales.
The copies of the movie are currently being distributed on the heaviest scales mainly through XDCC distribution on IRC, BitTorrent sites, and on P2P networks, inlcuding eD2K, which I checked earlier and found more than 5,000 sources for the XviD version. The retail is expected to hit some stores on the 10th and will be fully released around the world on the 14th.