Only a handful of people in the US and Australia paid to see John Doe in cinemas last year but the vigilante thriller has suddenly become one of the most downloaded titles on torrent sites globally.
Directed by Kel Dolen (Reign in Darkness, Gates of Hell) and scripted by Steve Coates, the film stars Battlestar Galactica’s Jamie Bamber as an anti-hero who attempts to rid the community of criminals while taking out those he knows are about to commit crimes.
The film was released theatrically in the US a year ago and the producers believe it was first pirated last July after it was released on DVD in the Netherlands.
After being launched on DVD and in a small number of cinemas in Australia last October, the film reappeared briefly on some torrent sites.
“Last Friday the US DVD/Blu-ray was released onto the torrents and for some reason it has taken off," Coates tells IF. It was the most downloaded film on some sites at the weekend while on another it ranked at No. 7 behind American Sniper, Big Hero 6, Birdman, Horrible Bosses 2, Nightcrawler and Gone Girl.
“Over the weekend the film's IMDB ranking has risen to 931 overall and the trailer has had around 250,000 hits on it,” Coates says.
“The potential number of downloads is staggering given the number of people downloading just from the one site I watched was constantly around 8,000 all weekend and it is still around 4,000. So that number could be as high as 32,000 per hour and that's just from one site. Any wonder the film industry is in the toilet.”
ScreenCorp’s James M Vernon, who produced the film with Kristy Vernon, Keith Sweitzer and David Lightfoot, says one site in Poland has served John Doe more than 200,000 times and there are thousands of such sites.
“This translated into hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of views, and is real money walking out the door,” Vernon says.
Coates accepts the film’s subject was challenging for some audiences, observing, “John Doe was always going to be a divisive film which makes it a hard sell for distributors and critics alike.
“But if you search Twitter for 'John Doe Vigilante' you will see an enormous amount of love from the general public over the weekend, which may indicate some kind of disconnect between the distributors and the public with regards to this film.”
The producers are pushing the US distributor to bring forward the DVD and VoD release from April 15 to try to cash in on this momentum.
Meanwhile Dolen and Coates are developing Bound, a horror film in the vein of Saw. The protagonist is a wealthy man who finds himself bound to a chair, unaware of where he is or why he is there.
He’s confronted by The Host and told the bizarre truth of his kidnapping: he is a “contestant” on a renegade broadcast which streams encrypted over the darknet.