The Super Mario Bros. Movie didn’t just hit make $US1 ($1) billion dollars, it also had the honour of being uploaded to Twitter for several hours.
Per Forbes, Illumination’s animated movie got posted on the website on late Saturday evening. Split across two parts, viewers were able to watch the full 92-minute movie at no extra cost, thanks to the efforts of Twitter user vidsthatgohard. (And from the sound of things, it was a pretty good quality rip overall.) Those two videos were up for several hours and through Sunday morning before they were finally deleted. But it definitely didn’t go unnoticed, as according to Forbes, over nine million people watched the movie prior to its deletion.
Though vidsthatgohard did the uploading, the real culprit here is Twitter Blue. The premium subscription service lets users upload videos up to an hour at length, something that’s been taken advantage of before. Along with the Mario movie, I can personally confirm that I saw high quality uploads on Twitter of films such as Avatar: The Way of Water and the original Fast and Furious movie, which were similarly split up into multiple videos. (These weren’t all from the same account, but other Twitter Blue users.) It’s not a good look for Twitter as a website or its moderation team, but it is a good example of just how little of a shit that people who use Twitter give nowadays.
At time of writing, it doesn’t look like the vidsthatgohard account has suffered any consequences for posting the full Mario movie. In fact, checking their account, they’re not only tweeting like nothing’s happened, they’ve just started to upload Bee Movie onto their account. And honestly, that may just be the most Twitter thing to happen out of this whole ordeal.