Expendables 3 Downloads Exceed 2 Million

It was one week ago when The Expendables 3 was released to the internet, prematurely and illegally.  Within the first 24 hours the movie was downloaded at least 200,000 times.  Now, within one week, the movie has been downloaded 2,000,000 times.

In fact, according to Variety, the movie was downloaded 1.8 million times by Tuesday.  Variety also cites studies that argue that movies that suffer premature leaks are likely to suffer 19% sales hits.  But things are worse than that for The Expendables 3, which has suffered a disastrous P.R. campaign, beginning before the movie even hit the net.

It started when Adobe predicted a box office bomb using tailored software that monitors online trending, such as trailer views etc. But this was before Stallone announced the PG-13 rating, conveniently timed with lavish Cannes festivities.  From there, negativity kicked into overdrive, with the films reputation circling the shitter.  The third stage of the disaster arrived with the leak, downloaded as of today by 2 million people.  Conservative numbers, the real figure is probably much higher as this is a metric difficult to size up, with streaming, sales on the street etc.

The final phase of negativity is the reaction coming out from people who have viewed the movie. By now, chances are even the dachshund next door has watched this movie and all but a few fanboys are tearing it limb from limb.  If you checked the official IMDb forums for the movie, which are the most active in relation to it as a discussion area, it’s basically one large queue of endless people lining up to personally take a shit on this movie.

Want an illustration?  At this rate, The Expendables 3 will have hermorrhaged the entire box office draw of The Last Stand before it even hits the big screen.  This will have serious implications for the box office of the movie, however you cut it.