After escaping from the planet Krypton years ago, 24-year-old Kara Zor-El is embracing her superhuman abilities. Better known as Supergirl, her latest adventures were to be showcased in a CBS pilot scheduled to air this coming November. This morning and six months early, the much-anticipated pilot leaked online.

After making an appearance as far back as 1958, Supergirl was intended to be a female counterpart to DC Comics’ Superman who first appeared 20 years earlier. While successful in her own right, she never quite reached the dizzy heights of the Clark Kent-based character.

This yeah, however, the world is braced for the return of Supergirl in a new CBS TV series. Featuring Melissa Benoist (Glee, Homeland, Law and Order) as Kara Zor-El, an alien who has hidden her powers since escaping from Krypton, the show will see her transform into Supergirl and “the superhero she was meant to be.”

After a commitment in September 2014, the series was officially picked up by CBS earlier this month. The pilot was scheduled to debut in November, but those plans have now massively unraveled after the episode leaked online, six months earlier than its planned debut.

Two ‘Scene’ release groups – DIMENSION and LOL – competed to premiere the title first this morning, with the latter beating the former by around 90 seconds. LOL’s version is a convenient 400mb so likely to become the most sought after copy. On the other hand DIMENSION’s is more than 15 times the size, but for 1080p connoisseurs it’ll be worth the wait.[Note: As some have pointed out, the two groups are connected, one releasing SD and the other HD]

Although it’s certainly possible that the pilot contains hidden watermarks, as far as visible identifiers go the 46 minute episode looks very clean. As illustrated by the image below, there are no tell-tale ‘property of’ warnings that are regularly seen on ‘screener’ copies of leaked movies.

The leak of the pilot came as a complete surprise a couple of hours ago so download stats on BitTorrent sites are a currently quite modest 25,000 or so. However, given the anticipated media snowball effect during the day the number of downloads is likely to increase dramatically, probably to more than a quarter million by this time tomorrow.

The Supergirl leak comes just weeks after the first four episodes of the new series of Game of Thrones leaked online. That event triggered a piracy crazy that continues to this day.

Whether more episodes of Supergirl will leak online in the days to come is unknown but in any event it seems likely that CBS will try to stem the current tide. The company is a prolific sender of DMCA takedown notices and regularly sends more than 100,000 each week to Google alone.

Update: Another pilot has leaked, this time of the forthcoming NBC TV series ‘Crowded‘. Leaked by the same groups (LOL and DIMENSION, which are connected) it is available in qualities up to 1080p. It runs for 22 minutes.

Supergirl trailer

