The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the biggest film in the world right now, having just crossed $1 billion at the global box office(opens in a new tab). But for a few days, you could watch the adventures of Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (voiced by Charlie Day) right from the comfort of your Twitter account.
As first reported by The Verge(opens in a new tab), the entire Super Mario Bros. Movie keeps being uploaded to Twitter. One version of the video was uploaded on April 28. Two days and over 9 million views later, Twitter removed the video due to copyright and suspended the user’s account.
However, the upload of The Super Mario Bros. Movie adds another wrinkle to Twitter’s copyright woes. Longer Twitter videos are one of the perks of subscribing to Twitter Blue. Starting in December of 2022(opens in a new tab), subscribers became able to upload videos up to 60 minutes long on the Twitter website, or videos up to 10 minutes long on iOS and Android.
Instead of being uploaded in two-minute long chunks, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was posted in two parts: one being precisely an hour long, and the other lasting the remaining half hour. According to The Verge‘s report, Avatar: The Way of Water — a three-hour-long movie! — was also uploaded to Twitter in a similar fashion.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is far from the first film to be uploaded to Twitter. In November 2022, movies like The Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift, Hackers, and Avatar were all posted to Twitter two minutes at a time, resulting in long threads where you could watch the movies in full. Despite being clear violations of Twitter’s copyright policy, the movies were left up for enough time for the threads to go viral. The same is true for copies of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
In all these cases, the extended time between upload and account suspension likely has to do with Twitter’s majorly decreased workforce, courtesy of layoffs from Elon Musk and resignations. Because that kind of piracy risk is exactly the kind of problem you want to invite when working with a skeleton crew.
