LOS ANGELES — (CNN) The people who uploaded Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie to the Internet are now having a serious case of pirates’ remorse.
Online piracy group Hive-CM8 issued a long, rambling statement Wednesday morning. It apologized for uploading “The Hateful Eight” to the Internet — and even gave the film a good review.
“We feel sorry for the trouble we caused by releasing that great movie before cinedate even has begun,” the group said in a Reddit post. “We never intended to hurt anyone by doing that, we didn’t know it would get that popular that quickly.”
“The Hateful Eight” debuted in theaters on Christmas, but Hive-CM8 managed to release the movie to the Internet on December 21.
Pirated movies are incredibly common — popular films inevitably make their way onto peer-to-peer torrent sites through one means or another, despite Hollywood’s efforts to clamp down on piracy.
Hive-CM8 said on Reddit that it got the DVD “from a guy on the street,” and that the group was not alone in illegally obtaining and posting “The Hateful Eight” to the Internet.
“We wanted to share this movie with the people who are not rich enough or not able to watch all nominated movies in the cinema,” the pirate group said.
Though it now regrets its actions, Hive-CM8 said the controversy might have actually generated buzz for the movie, generating more ticket sales than it would have otherwise received. The group said the movie is “excellent, thrilling and entertaining” and a “top candidate for the awards.”
Hive-CM8 thanked Tarantino for “this wonderful movie,” and it encouraged people to pay to see the film.
“Please support the producers and watch all movies in the cinema on a big screen, like you should do anyhow,” the group said. “The Producers need the money from ticket sales to get back the production costs.”
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