This past weekend, Avatar: The Last Airbender fans got the shock of their year when clips from The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender, the franchise’s vaunted return as a full-fledged movie sequel to the show, started hitting the internet. Then it was more than just clips. The whole film made its way online, and Paramount didn’t just stop it—the studio seemed like it didn’t care.
Part of what made the initial leak on X go so viral wasn’t just the fact that this was literally the first time anyone in the public got to see anything from the movie outside of random t-shirts, but also the way the leak was framed. “Nickelodeon accidentally emailed me the entire Avatar aang movie,” the tweet from the account “ImStillDissin” read in part, complete with a facepalming emoji. As Avatar fans lapped up the material and more clips began to emerge online—before eventually the whole movie hit the internet six months before it was set to hit Paramount+—the idea that someone at the studio had been so careless handling the film as to leak it via email caught on as emblematic of an uncaring Paramount that was willing to hang the Avatar franchise out to dry.
Except that wasn’t entirely the case. The user behind ImStillDissin told the Hollywood Reporter in a new report about the leak that the email didn’t actually come from within Paramount but from a friend from the user’s time as a hacker, which is why the initial clips were hastily watermarked “#PeggleCrew” as a nod to the hacking group that acquired access to the film—before this, one of the most significant breaches of a studio in recent memory, the group was best known for a 2016 hack of the download hosting site FossHub.
“I saw it’s just a Paramount+ thing, so I decided I’d troll a little bit,” the user told the trade, who apparently wasn’t even sure of what The Last Airbender was when they received the clip, before adding that they didn’t want to leak the full movie “not necessarily out of respect to Paramount,” but because they saw it as disrespectful to Flying Bark Productions and Avatar Studios. Not that it mattered: a day after the clips went viral, the entire movie was leaked by someone else.
According to THR, Paramount launched a still-ongoing investigation into the leak this week and has currently determined that the movie was not leaked through a vulnerability in its security systems and is continuing to take down clips as they spread across social media. But that doesn’t answer the question of just where the leak came from. The initial clips shared by ImStillDissin were from a recording of the film, but the full version that leaked online this week was of much higher quality, suggesting at the least that it was acquired directly somehow. It wouldn’t be the first time recently: adjacent to another Nickelodeon property, the 2024 SpongeBob movie Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie leaked days before it hit movie theaters.
But given that the leak is the biggest—and really only—promotion Paramount has given The Legend of Aang thus far, outside of the controversial news that it would be shifting the film from a theatrical release this year to a streaming exclusive (news that has, in part, inspired the spread of the leaks as a form of protest), it remains to be seen if Paramount will change its plans for the film again. No matter how it all started, it’s become quite the embarrassment for the studio.
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