In 2025, In the Hand of Dante was ready to take on the Venice Film Festival. Based on a best-selling novel, helmed by an Academy Award-nominated director, and with a stellar cast, including Oscar Isaac and Al Pacino, the film would easily find a distributor.
Then just a few weeks before the festival, the screener leaked online. Suddenly, the picture’s fate was in jeopardy.
This was far from an isolated incident.
In 2021, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) offered Covid-concerned audiences the opportunity to view festival films from home. Shortly afterwards, The Guilty and The Power of the Dog both leaked online.
And ahead of the 2025 Academy Awards, Oscar screener security took a hit when both September 5 and Nickel Boys screeners ended up on torrent sites within minutes of being shared with Academy voters.
It’s a problem the film industry has never really solved – how to get a movie in front of thousands of voters, critics, and guild members without losing control of the file itself. The move to digital screeners has done little to solve the issue.
The evolving problem of awards season screener leaks
For Your Consideration screeners go out to thousands of people. In the past, this was a nightmare for filmmakers – DVDs made it easy to copy and share productions before their official release. For instance – in 2016, a DVD screener of The Revenant was leaked online, resulting in an estimated $1 million in losses for Twentieth Century Fox.
Recently digital screener platforms and secure streaming links have replaced DVDs as the preferred method for distributing screeners. For a while, these seemed like a more secure method – in 2023 not a single Oscar screener appeared online. Then the leaks came back with a vengeance.
Digital distribution and the new threats to security
“Digital” and “secure” are not the same thing. Yes, you can stop casual sharing through a password-protected link. But what about once the film is actually playing? Every FYC platform eventually has to hand over control to the viewer’s home screen. Once there, no login wall, expiring URL, digital rights management, or really anything can stop a phone or screen-capture tool from recording what’s playing.
And this is just one point of failure. In 2026, just a few months before its premiere, the highly-anticipated Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was leaked in its entirety through a hack of the screening company. This breach shows another way screeners go astray: the vendors. Even before studios send out a screener, every platform, contractor, and third party between the film and its intended audience is a source of a potential leak.
Given the many people and systems that require access to the screeners, the odds that everyone will behave perfectly drop fast. That’s why screener leaks remain a recurring problem – the format changes, but the vulnerabilities don’t.
The real cost of a data leak
According to a peer-reviewed study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, pre-release leaks and piracy can cause a 19.1% drop in revenue when compared to leaks that occur after release. That can be the difference between a blockbuster and a flop.
Their research suggests that pre-release leaks cannibalize the theatrical turnout and shrink the word-of-mouth window studios spend months or even years building towards. All this before a film has had any chance to earn against its own costs.
Take Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a film with a reported $80 million budget: after the film leaked, Paramount scrambled to move up their streaming release date and even reinstated a previously scrapped limited theatrical run.
Nobody outside of Paramount knows exactly how much the leak cost them. The Avatar movie was designed to drive subscriptions to the Paramount+ streaming service, and beyond lost subscribers, the scramble itself cost Paramount. The studio had to rewrite its entire release strategy in real time because it lost control of its content.
More recently, Netflix is currently facing a $105 million lawsuit. The reason? An unreleased Nicolas Cage film, Fortitude, was stolen from their offices after being hand-delivered for an internal screening. The filmmakers allege that Netflix failed to secure the drive containing their screener. Whatever the outcome, the suit itself has cost Netflix both in terms of legal exposure and reputational damage.
How screener watermarking changes the equation
The average screener is designed to keep out unauthorized viewers. But, there’s a dangerous blind spot: the assumption that the threat is coming from someone who was never supposed to have access in the first place.
In reality, most leaks can be traced to someone who was authorized to view the materials – a voter, a critic, or a vendor employee who recorded the screen, shared credentials, or otherwise passed the film to an outside party.
Screener watermarking works differently. Instead of trying to stop every possible copy, it embeds a unique, imperceptible identifier into each individual copy sent to every single recipient. If that copy – or in most cases, a re-recorded, re-compressed, screen-captured version – turns up on a torrent site, piracy forum, or on social media, the watermark can be extracted and traced back to the leak.
We’re not talking about a visible “PROPERTY OF [STUDIO] – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” banner that can be cropped, blurred, or otherwise covered up. Forensic watermarking (like the kind provided by Steg.AI) is embedded in the pixels or audio itself. Since it’s distributed invisibly across the frame, it survives the kind of degradation screen recording introduces – compression, re-encoding, resizing, filming a monitor with a phone… even a single frame of a longer video can be used to identify leaked content.
That traceability – the leak accountability – is a deterrent all on its own. A person who is willing to record a screener anonymously probably isn’t up for the risk if their name is literally plastered all over the film. Once anonymity is off the table, the calculus of a leak changes – for both the individual tempted to leak, and for the studio deciding how much risk a given recipient represents.
Leak accountability is the realistic standard
There is no such thing as a leakproof screener (at least not yet). Each awards season screener is sent out to thousands of people, across multiple vendors and platforms, making it nearly impossible to stop every potential leak.
What studios can control is what happens afterwards: whether a leak is an anonymous dead end or a traceable incident with a clear source. That shift from prevention alone to prevention combined with accountability is where real progress on screener security starts.