The person behind the anonymous X account ImStillDissin figured he was just trolling when he leaked two minute-long clips of the Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender. On Sunday, a friend from his hacker days sent him a full copy of the movie. He didn’t know what it was until he looked it up.
“I saw it’s just a Paramount+ thing, so I decided I’d troll a little bit” by posting the videos, he says, explaining that he didn’t think it was a big deal since the movie isn’t being released in theaters. He added a #PeggleCrew watermark to the clips in a nod to the affiliation of the hacker that sent him the movie.
Within hours, the videos reached the far corners of the internet. That included 4Chan, where a community of superfan hackers discuss trading movies and TV shows they’ve illicitly attained amongst themselves and, at times, sell their hauls to the highest bidder. Posters egged ImStillDissin on to leak the full film. He resisted, though it didn’t matter. By Monday, an unrelated account that appears to belong to someone in Singapore leaked the full movie. It’s circulated widely across the diehard fanbase since then.
Hollywood is no stranger to leaks. Screeners of The Revenant, Zero Dark Thirty and Game of Thrones all hit the internet days or even weeks before they were officially released. Still, you’d have to go as far back as 2017, when hackers stole episodes of the newest season of Orange Is the New Black from the show’s postproduction vendor in a bid to extort Netflix, for another incident involving a title as big as Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender that was leaked months in advance.
Paramount has conducted an investigation into the incident. As part of the ongoing probe, the company eliminated the possibility that the leak was caused by a vulnerability in its systems, sources familiar with the situation tell The Hollywood Reporter. Clips of the movie on X are still being taken down through its copyright takedown process.
The fallout has sparked a discussion over Paramount’s decision to forgo a traditional theatrical release for a valuable franchise. The original series had a dazzling Netflix run in 2020 when it topped the streamer’s daily chart for more than 60 consecutive days — a record at the time for a non-Netflix original — and even last year when it ranked as the third most streamed animated show on the platform two decades after it was released. The series has finished among Nielsen’s Top 100 most-streamed titles during 17 of 139 weeks since its debut on the platform in March 2023. Paramount decided to bypass a theatrical run as part of its plan for its streamer to become the exclusive home of all animated content from Avatar Studios, the creative force behind the universe.
Pointing to Paramount’s pivot away from releasing the movie in theaters, some fans have defended their choice to illegally download the leaked movie. One common refrain: they would’ve pirated the film anyway since it would’ve premiered on Paramount+.
“Anyone watching the leak wouldn’t even be watching it on Paramount+ in the first place,” posted an account on 4Chan. “It literally makes no difference.”
Another praised the animation and said the movie “deserved to be in theaters.” They added of Paramount, “You fund animation like this, and you throw it on a dead platform without any fucking advertising? The leak is deserved.”
Animators for the movie urged fans to resist watching, explaining that doing so undermines the work of cast and crew. “This is incredibly disrespectful to all of the hard work the artists put in,” wrote Julia Schoel, creator of animated short film The Legend of Pipi who’s also worked on Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, on X. Still, she called Paramount opting not to pursue a theatrical release a “terrible decision,” adding that the crew “worked on the aang movie for years with the expectation that’d we’d get to celebrate all of our hard work in theaters.”
Added Tessa Bright, animation director at Flying Bark Studios, which animated the movie: “It’s perfectly reasonable for anyone who worked on this project to be frustrated at this situation. The amount of effort and dedication it took to make this film happen speaks for itself in the final product and I’m sure a lot of you will agree.”
ImStillDissin says he never planned to leak the entire movie “not necessarily out of respect to Paramount” but rather because it’s a “jackass thing to do to the animators.”
It didn’t matter. The video he shared was obtained by someone affiliated with PeggleCrew, a hacking group best known for its 2016 infiltration of a download hosting site to distribute malware, but it appears others already had the full movie.
“Multiple people had access” ImStillDissin says “not just my guy.”
The origin of the video he received is unclear. It was a recording of the movie, meaning there were likely security measures in place to prevent unauthorized downloading. The version of the film that was ultimately pirated across the internet was a high quality file, potentially indicating a breach of systems maintained by those that worked on the movie.
The incident follows an unfinished copy of Paramount’s Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie leaking a couple weeks ahead of its theatrical release in 2024. The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender is scheduled to premiere on Paramount+ in October, though the leak may force the David Ellison-led company to reconsider plans.
