Two People Arrested for Stealing the Expendables 3 and Leaking It to the Internet

Film producers are kicking ass and taking names.

Image via Lionsgate

Two British men have been arrested over The Expendables 3 being leaked to the internet ahead of it’s cinema release.

The latest installment of Sylvester Stallone’s elderly action heroes series opened in cinemas on 13 August, but high quality copies of the film were already floating around online in late July. The film’s distributor Lionsgate claimed that the leak significantly hurt the films box office, citing it as the reason it made $10 million less than expected (and conveniently ignoring the fact that maybe kids didn’t want to go and see an action movie starring guys old enough to be their dad). After the film’s failure, Lionsgate declared their intentions to find and convict those responsible.

Police announced that two men, one in Wirral and one in West Yorkshire, have been arrested on suspicion of stealing the film from a cloud-based system and then leaking it online. The men were arrested by the new Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) set up to last year to combat piracy.

Which is somewhat disappointing, as we kind of hoped they’d actually been taken in by a SWAT team lead by Stallone and Jason Statham.

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