memes

Digital distribution of Chinese cinema is (as far as I can tell) still all over the place. What we lost was all of the opportunities for leaks prior to the official digital distribution in the west.

Typical timeframes to release are around 30-90 days after it premieres in theaters, assuming it even gets a digital distribution.

A huge reason why rips of Chinese movies used to drop super fast was specifically because they were not webrips, but instead typically TK rips or prerelease footage.

Workprint distribution used to be everywhere. Films would occasionally leak to the scene sometimes months before the theatrical release, but sometimes had previs scenes and incomplete or entirely missing CGI. Often they were test screening copies that someone "lost." Enthusiasts seeking WP copies of films specifically for novelty or for differences from the release have a lot of trouble finding workprints from the last 10 years or so because they just don't leak anymore. It hung on a bit longer for foreign/non-US cinema, but not by much.

R5 copies also used to be more common, so named because they originated in Russia, and were distributed as Region 5 DVDs. These were telecine rips released shortly after the theatrical release date, and were made from the analog film copies distributed to Russian movie theaters. Typically they'd get ripped on premiere day or during opening weekend and then distributed quickly thereafter mostly as bootleg DVDs. Since digital cinema is now pretty universal, these don't happen anymore. No film reel, no R5.

Screeners are also basically dead, too. Video stores were the main source of screener rips, and those don't exist anymore. It's pretty rare for movie reviewers or industry VIPs to get sent personal screener copies these days, they frequently just get into media prescreenings in major market theaters.

TLDR: almost all of the old ways we used to get foreign films super quickly in the scene have gone the way of the dodo, and now we just have to wait for official distributions to hit Blu-Ray or Netflix like everything else, plus there's the added difficulty of official distribution being less available and prominent than for Hollywood films.