Iron Man 3 Already Circulating Pirate Sites...Sort Of

Following last night's midnight releases in a number of international markets, it's not surprising that by today, the film is already making the rounds on pirate sites, a little less than a week before its American release. U.S. fans looking to get a jump on their friends, though, will be disappointed; the version currently making the rounds is in Hungarian, according to comments under the upload. Bootleg copies of a movie that appear online before the film is officially released in the world's biggest movie market is a fairly new, but increasingly common, challenge for movie studios who want to open early in other countries to capitalize on the revenue and publicity bump that comes with early screenings around the world. Whether it has a tangible impact on the movie's performance is still unclear. Low-quality copies of Marvel's The Avengers was being passed around online and sold on street corners and subways in New York, before the film ever hit theaters and that movie still went on to gross more than a billion and a half dollars worldwide.