The Deadpool movie based on the comic book character was hyped on social media since last year and it made us anticipate for the premiere which was last Friday. We have seen studios employing the use of social media to hype films by giving them special tools to release trailers that go beyond the normal video limit.
In the case of Deadpool, they have used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to properly hype the wise cracking anti-hero. The engagement statistics, especially on the views on the trailers displayed the public’s massive interest on the film and this was shown by its massive opening weekend cash haul.
As usual with films of interest, people tend to illegally record the whole movie which they later on upload on the Internet. Normally, they upload it on torrent sites and sometimes on YouTube, but on the latter, it is usually quickly removed due to copyright laws.
Facebook has a bubbling video platform thanks to its algorithm powered News Feed that suggests more videos according to your tastes and its massive user base. In this unusual case however, we stumbled upon the entire Deadpool movie which was uploaded on a Facebook page yesterday. It was obviously recorded on a phone (not so good quality) and the surprising thing is that the movie is 1 hour and 36 minutes long. According to Facebook, the maximum size for a video upload is 1.75GB and since Deadpool is a rather short film, the upload probably was smaller than the limit. It could also mean that Facebook increased the upload limit but that is speculation as of now.
Well, it won’t be long before the upload is removed due to copyright issues but it should worry studios that entire films can be uploaded on Facebook’s video platform.
[Update 18th Feb 2015: The video has since been taken down]
