Fan films, for those who may not know, are essentially crowd-sourced films set in a particular cinematic universe that either continue the story told in them or run parallel to them.
They've been around for years, stretching back to the likes of the original series of Star Trek, right up to today. Even Andy Warhol made a fan film about Batman in the '60s, called Batman Dracula, which starred underground artist Jack Smith in the role of Batman and was done completely without the permission of DC Comics.
In most cases, studios either ignore them or merely allow them to exist without monetisation of them - but, in other cases, studios firmly shut them down as it's deemed as diluting their intellectual property rights. It's rare, then, for a major studio like Warner Bros. to allow a feature-length, crowd-sourced fan film to screen - but here we are, nevertheless.
Voldemort: Origins Of The Heir follows the early life of Tom Riddle, who'd later become Voldemort, and follows Grisha MacLaggen as she investigates the murder of a descendant of the Hufflepuff family. The trailer for the film debuted online a few days ago and amassed close to 30,000,000 - that's thirty million - views in that time. The film itself, meanwhile, has over 4,000,000 views in just two days.
In an interview with Polygon, the directors of the film - Gianmaria Pezzato and Stefano Prestia - explained that the only way they were allowed to release the film is if they did so without monetisation and make it free for anyone to watch - which is why it's now up on YouTube and we're talking about.
Here's the full film.
Via YouTube
