Movie piracy isn’t fun for anyone, especially those who’ve worked hard on the finished project. Recently, the third instalment in the Spider-Verse franchise, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, was one of many hotly anticipated movies that fell victim to an unauthorized leak. Christopher Nolan’s box-office smash-hit, The Odyssey, was also subject to a pirated version being uploaded to X. It garnered almost 500,000 views before being removed after Universal issued a copyright strike.
No Spider-Man movie was safe either, as Spider-Man: Brand New Day was also subject to a trailer leak in June. And in 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home suffered the same fate before it was set to debut online officially. In nearly all of these cases, the footage was low-quality and poorlyrendered, which is exactly what happened with Beyond the Spider-Verse, as four minutes of trailer footage were uploaded across severalsocial media platforms. It wasn’t long before producer and co-writer Chris Miller caught wind of it and shared his thoughts on the situation.
On Friday (Aug. 14.), he posted on X: “Not a fan of leaks of unfinished, not fully rendered footage.” According to IGN, the leaked footage appears to include the animated opening of the movie, as well as a montage indicating a Jun. 18, 2027 release date. It is also said to bear a striking resemblance to footage shown exclusively at CinemaCon this year, where the first images of Beyond the Spider-Verse debuted. It’ll be a mad dash for Sony Pictures to stop any more leaks dead in their tracks. The clips have been making their way across different platforms, so it’ll be a difficult task.
Miller isn’t the only creative to have spoken out against these unauthorized leaks, either. Earlier this year, the full version of the Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender movie was posted on X well before its official Paramount+ release. Variety reports that a 26-year-old man in Singapore was arrested for illegally accessing a media server and leaking the movie. In response, both the movie and the original TV series’ cast urged fans not to watch the unauthorized leak, as star Eric Nam said it was disrespectful to the “countless hours” the creators and artists had spent working on the project.
As for what Beyond the Spider-Verse holds for protagonist Miles Morales, Miller and writer/producer Phil Lord explained that the story would focus on a family in conflict and the way “you put them back together.” The third film already sees the return of Shameik Moore (Miles Morales) and Hailee Steinfeld (Gwen Stacy) as they go head-to-head against The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), picking right straight up from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. However, in the third film, Miles will be attempting to save both his biological and found families while on the run across alternative dimensions—just Spider-Man things.
