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Pirate Bay dishes up Iron Man 2 ahead of US release
Dodgy video shop bloke's secret stash is yesterday's news
Iron Man 2 is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to be leaked onto The Pirate Bay ahead of the movie’s official release in the US.
The film’s studio actually spun out the release early internationally in a move to big up interest in the sequel ahead of next month’s World Cup tournament.
However, the North American audience won’t get an official glimpse of the movie until this weekend when it hits cinemas in that region.
Iron Man 2 has been a box office smash in 52 countries over the past few days, scoring $100m in overseas ticket sales, Reuters reports. In the UK alone it grossed $12.2m in the first 48 hours following its release.
But the decision by Paramount Pictures to unleash the film early in markets outside of the US has meant that pirated copies have landed on BitTorrent tracker website The Pirate Bay as a free - albeit mostly poor quality - download for anyone who can’t wait for the cinema release Stateside.
This is not the first time a superhero movie has leaked onto the interwebs. In April last year X-Men Origins: Wolverine tipped up on a number of BitTorrent websites ahead of its 1 May 2009 release.
At the time its distributor, 20th Century Fox, coughed to the embarrassing leak and described the illegal download as an incomplete version of the movie, which differs from what’s happened with Iron Man 2, with pirates adopting the more amateur approach of pointing a shaky video camera at the cinema screen and pressing record. ®