FilmOne Studios’ Adire Pirated And Available To Watch On YouTube

YouTube is becoming another hotspot for pirating Nollywood films, 'Adire' is the latest victim.

FilmOne Studios’s first original feature film Adire, which was released on Netflix last week, is currently available to watch on the YouTube page, Movie Zonez, and is now publicly accessible for illegal downloads. 

The film is branded with “Download More on SERIEZLOADED.NG”, which implies the YouTube channel downloaded it from SeriezLoaded Ng, a go-to website for illegal downloads which became more popular following the rise of NetNaija. Movie Zonez also has Inkblot Production’s recently released A Weekend to Forget, which is currently streaming on Prime Video.

On April 22, 2023, a part of Jade Osiberu’s Brotherhood was published on a different YouTube channel, Banki Movies. The video, which is over an hour long,  currently has almost half a million views. Around November of the same year, another channel, Eeshaa TV, posted the entire film. The video currently has twenty-one thousand views.

This version of the criminal act of piracy is another layer on top of the already existing menace of using Telegram to share exclusive Intellectual Property. On some of these channels, films and TV shows from all major streamers — Netflix, Prime Video and Showmax — on the continent are available for download.

Piracy for so long has been a major challenge in Nollywood since the days of DVD and Home Videos. With streaming and the internet, filmmakers and distributors have a more unique and difficult challenge to stopping it, as everyday people get these copyrighted materials and distribute them on social platforms and websites. Sometimes, they even charge other individuals for it.

Just last December, news of the pirated version of Funke Akindele's record-breaking A Tribe Called Judah circulated, and not very long after, people could see clips from the film being constantly posted on WhatsApp status.

Toyin Abraham’s  Malaika which was released on December 21, 2023, was also pirated and shared on Telegram. Toyin, while addressing a team of journalists, admitted that she experienced panic attacks when she saw her film, which she had spent 500 million naira to make pirated and shared on Telegram. The filmmaker said this led to her hospitalization. She took the matter to the police and they were able to arrest five individuals following this incident. 

Currently, Telegram is the go-to platform for the nefarious act of movie piracy, away from websites. YouTube is now becoming another option with films like Brotherhood being available illegally for months. The YouTube page, Movie Zonez, where Adire has been uploaded and made available for downloads, has over 2,000 subscribers. The film was uploaded on January 14 and currently has over 35,000 views. 

This is less than two weeks after Adire’s release on Netflix. Adire had a six-week cinema run last year and made thirty-one million naira during its run.