Piracy website Tamil Rockers is becoming a massive threat to the Tamil film industry. The website has streamed several hit movies within hours of their release causing huge monetary loss to the producers.
The website has leaked the full version of an upcoming independent film, Variyavan, a thriller written and directed by Karthik Gopal, before its official release in India. The film was officially streamed on Amazon Prime for audiences in the US and UK.
Speaking to TNM, director Karthik Gopal said, “I am a software engineer and filmmaking is my passion. We are a team of friends who have done more than 7 short films which have been received well by the audience.”
He added, “Our dream was to do a feature film and we started working towards it. As a first step, we decided to do a pilot film. We completed the script and titled it ‘Variyavan’ and it went on the floors in the year 2015. Due to non-availability of time as we are working other jobs during weekdays, it took us 3 years to complete it. As it will be a base for our feature film journey, we decided to approach online streaming platforms to showcase it, as we had incurred a production cost we had to get our ROI.”
Talking about the leak, Karthik said, “After a long wait, the film first got released for Amazon’s US and UK online markets 10 days ago. We had approached Netflix to release it in India, which is under process. Within 3 days of its release, it got leaked on piracy website Tamil Rockers, after which it got leaked on YouTube… I was absolutely shocked. We have reported and removed several videos from YouTube, but we are not able to do anything about Tamil Rockers. This will affect our Indian release.”
Touted to be an emotional thriller, the independent film stars Parthy KL and Hari Kumar in the lead roles.
This isn’t the first time a new film has been leaked by Tamil Rockers. The admins of this site have remained anonymous. The torrent site has run into controversies many times by streaming many south Indian movies live, including big films like Baahubali, Premam and others. The website threatened to leak Vijay’s Sarkar, which released on Deepavali, and the upcoming Rajinikanth starrer 2.0 ahead of their release.
In other instances of piracy, parts of Taxiwala, actor Vijay Deverakonda’s upcoming Telugu movie, were leaked in August along with his last box office hit Geetha Govindam.
The Tamil Film Producers’ Council headed by Vishal has drawn up some stringent measures to combat piracy that is affecting the film industry on a large scale. The most significant move is that every theatre has been asked to install CCTV cameras with a November 15 deadline. Theatres with no CCTVs or with non-functional CCTVs cannot screen new movies, according to the new rules.
(Content provided by Digital Native)