The Super Mario Bros. Movie didn’t just hit make $1 billion dollars, it also had the honor of being uploaded to Twitter for several hours. And it wasn’t the only one—James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water got the same treatment.
Per Forbes, Illumination’s animated movie got posted on the website on late Saturday evening. Split across two parts, viewers were able to watch the full 92-minute movie at no extra cost, thanks to the efforts of Twitter user vidsthatgohard. (And from the sound of things, it was a pretty good quality rip overall.) Those two videos were up for several hours and through Sunday morning before they were finally deleted. But it definitely didn’t go unnoticed, as according to Forbes, over nine million people watched the movie prior to its deletion. The Way of Water was uploaded earlier in the evening sometime prior to the Mario movie from the same account, and also split into multiple parts since it’s a 3-hour movie. Unlike with Mario, though, it’s not clear how many people decided to watch Avatar before Twitter took it down.
Though vidsthatgohard did the uploading, the real culprit here is Twitter Blue. The premium subscription service lets users upload videos up to an hour at length, something that’s been taken advantage of before. Along with those two films, I can personally confirm that I saw high quality uploads on Twitter of the original Fast and Furious movie some weeks back. It’s not a good look for Twitter as a website or its moderation team, but it is a good example of just how little of a shit that people who use Twitter give nowadays.
At time of writing, it doesn’t look like the vidsthatgohard account has suffered any consequences for posting two whole movies onto its feed. In fact, checking their account, they’re not only tweeting like nothing’s happened, they’ve just started to upload Bee Movie onto their account. And honestly, that may just be the most Twitter thing to happen out of this whole ordeal.
Update: 1:38 PM ET: This post has been updated to add information regarding Avatar: The Way of Water getting uploaded onto Twitter in the same timeframe as the Mario movie.
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