The online leak of a full version of Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender—a highly anticipated animated film in a multimedia fantasy franchise—has divided passionate fans while upsetting those who spent years working on the film.
The leaks began on X late on Saturday night, about six months before Aang was scheduled to premiere on Paramount+. User @ImStillDissin posted two short clips from the film. “Nickelodeon accidentally emailed me the entire Avatar aang movie,” he claimed. He also threatened to stream the entire movie if Paramount didn’t release an official trailer, and he posted a still from the movie’s end credits, revealing previously undisclosed voice-over cast and roles. The media from @ImStillDissin’s posts were later hit with copyright strikes and removed.
But within 48 hours, links to download the full movie appeared on 4chan and X, where some users also directly streamed the film. Across the web, fans said they had successfully pirated and watched what appeared to be a nearly finished and “beautiful” animated film.
While some argued that Paramount deserved to be punished because of certain creative and marketing decisions around the movie, others noted what a blow the leak was to the animators and production crew. A number of those team members took to social media to convey their sadness and frustration.
“We worked on the aang movie for years with the expectation that’d [sic] we’d get to celebrate all of our hard work in theaters. Just to see people unceremoniously leak the film and pass our shots around on twitter candy,” animator Julia Schoel wrote Tuesday on X.
The user behind @ImStillDissin, who would not reveal his real name due to fear of legal repercussions, tells WIRED that he obtained the movie almost by chance and did not expect his posts to set off such a crisis in the entertainment world. “When I posted those clips I was purely trolling,” he says. “I was expecting a day of clout farming at best, not for the whole thing to blow up this.”
(While WIRED has done its due diligence in verifying that the person speaking to us was behind the @ImStillDissin X account, we acknowledge that the hacking community is known to troll.)
According to @ImStillDissin, a screen-grabbed version of Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender was circulating among people he knew from his days in the hacking community, one of whom d it with him. “Broadly speaking, the supply chain for movies and TV is rife with insecure companies and vendors and lax checks,” he claims. He notes that two different SpongeBob SquarePants movies leaked months before their release dates in 2024. “Someone on 4chan who wasn’t happy at me drip-feeding stuff posted a copy of a draft script [of the new Avatar film] from two years back,” says @ImStillDissin.
Neither Nickelodeon nor its parent company Paramount have confirmed a hack had taken place, nor have they issued a statement on the matter. They also did not respond to requests for comment.
Originally announced in 2021, Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender marked the first production for Avatar Studios, a division of Nickelodeon’s animation department.
Some people felt justified in pirating and sharing the movie due to the recasting of voice actors. Last year, during a Reddit AMA, casting director Jenny Jue wrote that the voice cast from the Avatar TV show that aired on Nickelodeon in the 2000s was not returning due to efforts to “match actors’ ethnic/racial background to the characters they’re portraying.”
That comment set off a round of griping from fans about “identity politics.” Some predicted a “backlash” from those nostalgic for the voices of the TV series cast.
Then, at the end of last year, Paramount, announced that it was canceling a planned October 2026 theatrical release for the movie, opting instead to make it exclusively available to stream on Paramount+. The move drew outcry from fans who had looked forward to seeing it on the big screen. (Resentment over it has also been used to rationalize the leaking of the film.)
People cited both of those decisions to justify watching the movie early.
“After what Nickelodeon and Paramount did to the voice actors, I do not care,” wrote one X user. “Should’ve kept the original VAs instead of giving in to DEI bullshit.” Some suggested that while they had sympathy for the creative team, Paramount’s close ties to Donald Trump via CEO David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, left them conflicted. “On one hand I feel bad for the creators but on the other, fuck Paramount and their MAGA asses,” another X user posted.
When he received a copy of the movie, @ImStillDissin wasn’t aware of either controversy. “I Googled and saw it was going to be a Paramount+ release and thought ‘Oh, whatever, guess this isn’t that big a deal.’” So he watermarked his clips with the name “PeggleCrew” as a shoutout to his mischievous old hacker clique, d them on X, and started in on his trollish commentary.
The incident is a stark reminder of how difficult it can be to protect painstakingly made art in an era of mass streaming, media consolidation, and culture war politics that infect already fraught fan communities.
“Leaking a movie before release undermines the entire effort at its most vulnerable moment,” Schoel wrote. “No marketing buildup, premieres, etc, which harms the film’s reputation and affects future opportunities for the artists who worked on it.”
Jason Scheier, a production designer at Sony Animation who worked on the film for several months, tells WIRED it’s disappointing to see fans the leaked movie without regard for the creatives’ future career prospects.
“Revenue determines if sequels get greenlit and how a film covers its production and marketing costs. This is devastating to the team and to the studios producing the movie.”
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