What many of you see is simply Korea attacking Glitch unfairly. But there is something you should understand first: Glitch attempted to hide behind its fandom by twisting the truth in order to protect itself.
As we all know, in their statement they claimed:
- “Distribution is being completely rejected because of censorship laws.”
- “One distributor asked us to send the original video files via email so they could mail them to the ratings board.”
- “We are not giving up distribution in that region.”
First: if censorship laws had truly been the issue, distribution in Korea would never have proceeded in the first place. The agreements had already moved forward. That alone proves censorship laws were never the real problem.
Second: the way they worded their statement was clearly designed to make people assume they were talking about Korea. However, what Korea requested was a DCP file — an encrypted cinema distribution format that cannot simply be “leaked” unless someone intentionally hacks and decrypts it. As far as we understand, this is the standard file format used worldwide for theatrical screenings.
Do Glitch truly believe film distribution works the same way as uploading a video to YouTube?
We informed them that this file would be required before the agreement was finalized, and we believed Glitch accepted those terms when the contract was signed. Apparently, however, they did not properly understand the agreement they themselves approved.
There is also a major contradiction in their explanation. They claimed they were deeply concerned about potential leaks. Yet Glitch had already provided us with the entire film file beforehand so that the Korean review process could even begin. If leakage had truly been such a concern, why provide the film in the first place? Did they suddenly decide to withdraw because they feared a leak during the review process? What exactly do they think Korean professional companies are?
It is difficult to understand why their story changed so drastically afterward. Is cutting out all surrounding context and simply saying “we tried our best” supposed to resolve everything?
By posting tweets written in a way that strongly implies Korea may leak the film, they have only fueled distrust and harassment toward Korean fans. Let us ask something very simple: have Korean fans ever been responsible for major theatrical leaks of films like Super Mario or Avatar? Of course not.
We are extremely disappointed in how this situation has been handled.
At this point, honestly, it feels impossible to forgive any response they may release moving forward. Because this is very clearly discrimination.
When the popup event incident and racial discrimination issues occurred previously, Glitch responded immediately. But this time, every question we continuously asked has been ignored, and all we received was “we are trying.” In the end, they gave us no direct answers while handing toxic fans a perfect excuse to attack and mock the Korean fandom.
Have you ever seen such an irresponsible corporate response?
And finally, third:
They claimed they were “not giving up distribution in that region,” yet they already completely canceled the Korean screenings while ignoring Korea’s attempts to coordinate schedules. They even stated they would refuse contracts with any other distributor moving forward. Did they forget that?
Did they think privately saying one thing while pretending otherwise publicly would prevent the truth from coming out?
We sincerely hope a proper official statement will be released soon. Please think carefully about your actions. Hopefully, your company hires competent public relations staff as soon as possible — because that may be the only chance left for this situation to improve.
If there’s been any theatre cancellations or an inability to enter a region, we want you to know that we’ve been trying our best. There’s ratings compliance, security policy and legal rules specific to EACH country and theatre chains that we are trying to navigate around the clock.
Some regions are straight up rejecting our distribution because there are censorship laws and we refuse to change the original vision of this show. In other regions, there are laws that say we can’t due to how close it is to its streaming release. Any cancellations or refusals have been due to security concerns. For example, one distributor wanted us to email them the raw video file so they could then mail it to ratings agencies by post. This is how leaks happen and we take this very seriously.
This however, does not mean we aren’t still trying relentlessly to enter these regions. We also want this finale to be accessible in as many countries as possible. Thank you all for helping the TADC finale get this far.