Yesterday, Sony Media made a boo-boo. In an endeavor to upload a trailer for a movie titled Khali the Killer , someone over at Sony made the mistake of putting the entire movie up. What’s worse, somehow no one at the company noticed for several hours; plenty of people have now seen the full film and others are flocking to the actual trailer, commenting their dismay at missing out on the golden opportunity. Ars Technica explains that this movie actually saw it’s first full release back in 2017 in Germany.
As can be seen in the trailer for this movie — shared above for your viewing pleasure — Khali the Killer comes off as a somewhat ’70s exploitation inspired film, with a hint of western. It’s seemingly meant to appear grainy, if not a bit seedy. IMDb provides a synopsis for the movie.
“After deciding to retire, an East L.A. hit man decides to take one last job to help support his ailing grandmother’s end of life care. But everything falls apart, when he develops empathy for the targets of his hits, and he’s forced to make the toughest decision of his life.”
The movie is an Indie film directed by John Matthews and listed as a drama. Runtime for this one is listed on Rotten Tomatoes as 89 minutes and does not yet have an audience score or a tomato meter rating. Ars Technica cites the full length at one hour and 30 minutes. The Indie film world can be a strange breed, with release orders often being entirely out of whack. In the U.S., Khali the Killer is not slated for theatrical release until this year. This one seems to have more than an odd release order in tow. Some out there are wondering if the movie leak was even an accident. Meanwhile, The Verge has a laundry list of other questions that surely a lot of people now share in. Indeed, the biggest question likely on every everyone’s mind at this point is how does this type of accident even happen? If it was an attempt to bring hype to this feature, time will tell if such a ploy worked — if it was a fake leak. Some people are suggesting this event must have been on purpose, via comments posted on the trailer.
Reporters at Ars don’t believe this to be the case. A mistake like this one could boil down to a simple misstep with the wrong video ID number. Sony and other similar organizations use a process for publishing videos to various platforms that apparently presents room for error. Or perhaps it was another hack. Sony is, after all, no stranger to security hacks. Either way, this is surely embarrassing for Sony, especially given past occurrences. The year 2014 proved to be a tough one for Sony, among various other companies, when a studio-wide cyberattack revealed highly sensitive information such as passwords and executive salaries. More on that story can be found on Engadget for the curious bunch.
Still, numerous Reddit users such as GeraltForOverwatch speculate that this entire fiasco is actually a viral marketing effort meant to gain buzz for a film that, thus far, is extremely lacking.
Sony has not yet made a public comment about the incident.
