Digital piracy often gets a bad rap. Maybe it’s memories of those old “You wouldn’t steal a car” pre-roll ads that were a fixture in theaters. Maybe it’s the word “piracy.” But recent research suggests that uploading, downloading, and swapping movies illegally isn’t necessarily an impediment to a given title’s bottom line. One study found that word of mouth generated by illegal sharing of movies can actually increase box-office revenues. And for cinephiles who may be cut off (either financially or geographically) for the indie or art-house cinemas, piracy can prove essential—or at least a necessary evil. As Andy Chatterley, CEO of research firm Muso, told WIRED earlier this year, “The thing about piracy is, it’s really just people wanting to consume content. They’re not doing it for the act of piracy; they’re being driven by marketing on other things that drive legal consumption.”

Smaller films like Red Rooms often find audiences in such less-than-legal circles. Lucas Tavares, 23, lives in a small town in Brazil. He obsessively follows film coverage on social media platforms like X and Letterboxd. Red Rooms first came to his attention over a year ago, when it premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. A few weeks later, he was able to scrounge a copy online. “Where I live,” he says, “it’s very hard to see smaller movies, and independent movies, especially if they are not American blockbusters. So I rely on torrents a lot.”

For Henry Meeks, a 29-year old school teacher in Philadelphia, torrents and online piracy channels became essential during the Covid-19 lockdowns. With cinemas shuttered and film production all but halted, many cinephiles took the opportunity to dig deeper into older, harder-to-find films. “What I love about piracy,” Meeks says, “is that there’s tons of movies that have fallen out of distribution. There’s no Blu-ray. So it’s a really good archival practice. Stuff that I really can’t find anywhere, even if I wanted to buy it, is kept alive on those websites.”

When Meeks heard some buzz about Red Rooms, he downloaded it and immediately shared it with friends on Plex: the freeware streaming-media service that allows users to amass and share collections of private media. This curation distinguishes private servers like Plex from the bigger, aboveground streaming services with their algorithmic recommendation systems. “Netflix and Amazon Prime have more movies than you could ever see,” Meeks says. “But it’s not really curated by a human.”

Plante seems a little ambivalent about his movie’s success online. While he is embracing his movie leaking, he notes that building this sort of word of mouth was very much “not a strategy.” He says the film’s French-Canadian distributor insisted on dropping Red Rooms’ on Canadian video-on-demand services shortly after its theatrical premiere. “I told him that the day after it’s on iTunes in Canada, it’s going to be on freaking PirateBay,” he says, referring to the popular BitTorrent client.

Of course, not everyone has the ability, or inclination, to download MP4 or AVI files of relatively obscure French-Canadian cyber-thrillers. Plante is confident the film’s upcoming wide release in US cinemas, on September 6, will help expand his movie’s niche, cultish appeal. Smaller movies like this tend to have a long life, moving through the international film festival circuit to bigger bookings in cinemas and to home video. Gray-web peer-to-peer file-sharing websites are just one place people can find the film.

Still, Plante finds it totally appropriate that his movie about the internet’s underbelly has found an audience among people who wade in those same waters.“It’s a very online, very geeky film,” he says. “Of course people are going to torrent it.”