The man accused of posting Paramount+’s Avatar: The Last Airbender animated film in full online was found by police in Singapore
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| "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (Credit: Nickelodeon) |
A man accused of posting the entirety of Paramount's upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender animated feature has been arrested in Singapore. The 26-year-old suspect could face up to seven years in prison and a $50,000 fine for stealing and dispersing the film, The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender.
The footage began going around in mid-April as social media users started sharing the full follow-up film to the original animated Avatar: The Last Airbender series. The film, which features Team Avatar as young adults in the early space between the finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, was set to release in theaters on Friday, October 9, however, in December, Paramount announced that they had pivoted the film, along with upcoming Avatar series Avatar: Seven Havens, to be a streaming exclusives on Paramount+.
First reported by The Straits Times, police stated that they received a report on Thursday, April 16 about the circulation of parts of an unreleased film on social media platforms. The man was identified and arrested within a day of the report.
According to police, the man accessed restricted servers to download the film and leak it online. Various devices belonging to the man were seized, with a copy of The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender being recovered from them. The maximum punishments for these crimes would be seven years in prison and/or a $50,000 fine.
The police said preliminary investigations revealed that the man had gained unauthorised remote access to the server and downloaded the film, which he later posted parts of online.
Following the leak, many of the artists and animators who worked on the film spoke out about early, unofficial release on social media. No trailer or footage of the film had been officially shared by Paramount before the leak.
“We worked on the aang movie for years with the expectation that’d we’d get to celebrate all of our hard work in theaters … just to see people unceremoniously leak the film and pass our shots around on twitter like candy,” said animator Julia Schoel on X. “I don’t like seeing people use paramount’s awful decision to remove the movie from theaters to justify leaking it. I totally understand folks not wanting to pay for/support paramount+. but pirating the movie after its release would have at least been better than this. This is incredibly disrespectful to all of the hard work the artists put in.”
The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender will stream on Paramount+ on October. 9.
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