If it 'leaked,' ask who brought the bucket.
Some leaks are security failures. A lot of them are Tuesday.
A trailer appears on a fan account two days early and the internet congratulates itself for stealing fire. Then the official account posts the same file, cropped slightly worse. You were not in a heist. You were in a rollout.
Real leaks exist: a script in a rideshare, a cut on a wrong server, a person who will never work again. Those have lawyers attached. The other kind has a media team that knows surprise is a spice you apply, not a season you wait for.
A test
- Did the ‘leak’ land on a quiet news day for the project?
- Was the quality suspiciously high?
- Did the studio ‘condemn’ it with a quote that still described the plot?
- Was the official version up within 24 hours?
Three yeses and you are looking at a campaign. Write it as a campaign. Calling it a leak makes you the unpaid publicist with worse facts.
What we will not publish
Full stolen scripts. Cam recordings. Passworded screeners. If a document is both real and not meant for the public, we do not launder it for a bounce rate. We can report that a leak happened, from a named outlet, without pasting the loot.
Curiosity is not a legal defense. It is also not a personality. The adult version of this beat is: who benefits if you see this today, and who is pretending they do not.
