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Pirated 'DVD Screeners' Will be History After Next Year's Oscars
The Academy announced this week that DVD and Blu-Ray screeners will be banned after the next Oscars ceremony. This marks the end of a long-standing tradition. Not just in the movie business, but also on pirate sites where the DVDscr tag is closely watched. Although Oscar DVD Screeners may soon be history, this doesn't mean that screener leaks will be thing[s] of the past.
[...] This year, plenty of discs will be shipped too but, after the upcoming Oscars ceremony, that will be a thing of the past. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this week that physical screeners will no longer be allowed in 2021.
"[T]he 93rd Awards season will be the final year DVD screeners will be allowed to be distributed; these mailings will be discontinued starting in 2021 for the 94th Academy Awards," the Academy writes.
The Oscars follow the same path as the Emmys, which already made the switch this year. According to the Academy, the transition is part of its sustainability efforts. This also includes a ban on physical music CDs, hard copies of screenplays, paper invites, and other things that possibly hurt the environment.
[...] Whether piracy was considered as a factor at all remains a guess. Some insiders believe that digital screeners are easier to protect and therefore more secure, but that is up for debate.
There may be fewer leak opportunities in the distribution process, but it's common knowledge that streaming platforms can be easily compromised. In fact, we have already seen several screeners being leaked from online sources. This was corroborated by pirate release group EVO last year.
"We had access to digital screeners and they are indeed easy to leak. The DRM on it is a joke. We had an account last year with three screeners on it and they were pretty much MP4 ready to encode," the EVO team informed us at the time.
Related: First Leaked Screener of the Season: Unreleased Louis C.K. Film "I Love You, Daddy"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday May 03 2020, @09:35PM (7 children)
All the good movies have been made already.
Now they just make everything with the chroma cranked up to 11
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday May 03 2020, @10:24PM
All the good movies have been made already.
Now they're just remaking everything but worse.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 04 2020, @01:21AM (5 children)
The reason you think movies from today suck compared to those of the past is that most movies from the past sucked too, but the movies from the past that sucked were either forgotten completely or had Joel/Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo making them funny instead of unbearable. For every Casablanca there were dozens if not hundreds of films trying and failing to be something like it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Monday May 04 2020, @02:15AM (4 children)
Back then they also made a lot more small, low budget movies. Sure, they cranked out a lot of garbage, but when the stakes aren't very high you can also experiment and take chances. Sometimes it works out and you get a gem, sometimes it's still okay, other times it's MST3k fodder.
Today movies are all about big budget tent pole movies. The investors sinking that kind of money into a movie don't want to take a risk. That's why everything is the same play by numbers, risk-adverse, take no chances, formulaic garbage, dumbed down so it is easy to translate for the foreign markets, and watered down to make it past the Chinese censors, and has to be part of some already well established (and beaten to death) franchise.
It's not that movies from the past didn't suck, it's that today's movies suck.... differently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2020, @03:18PM
No, indies still exist and in about the same proportion. Once every year or three one of them really rises to prominence, and one can usually find a decent small budget production available if you know where to look and how. They've gotten outshouted by the 9000 pound gorilla that are the MCU, DCAU, and the rest of the Disney machine, but they exist.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 04 2020, @05:27PM (2 children)
Counterpoint: Everybody and their kid brother own a camera, and some of them use it to create low-budget films. I agree those don't get much by way of audience attention usually, and many of them aren't feature-length, but it's not like low-budget films aren't happening.
For instance, a friend of mine was a zombie for a low-budget remake of Night of the Living Dead.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2020, @06:01PM
Wait, even the low-budget nothing-to-lose films are doing remakes? That's not going to help...
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Tuesday May 05 2020, @01:35AM
That's true, and I'd rather spend 2 hours watching random stuff on Youtube than try to watch what passes for most Hollywood movies nowadays.
However, as far as the Academy is concerned, none of that stuff counts and they've been fighting any attempts that might get it included. Of course, that really only matters if you actually care about the Oscars, which I really don't.