By Sherwin Loh
Digital Life Reporter
sherwin@sph.com.sg

 

IF IT was an April Fool's joke gone wrong, Hugh Jackman isn't laughing.

Reports of a full length, DVD quality workprint of the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie emerged on April 1st and it took only a short while before Netizens realised it was not a joke. 

Just give me a keyboard!
Source: Handout

The source of the leak has not been determined, but the non-watermarked video file has cropped up on several file sharing sites and reviews have also started to emerge.

What is definite is that this is an early print containing unfinished special effects and is shorter in length than the final cut scheduled for theatrical release only one month later, on May 1st. 

Naturally, lawyers from distributor 20th Century Fox have been quick to serve notice to sites distributing the movie, but the damage is done and Wolverine has been released to an unsuspecting public, one month before his official premiere.

Unfortunately, this fiasco is not something that everyone's favourite mutant can claw himself out of. A quick check at a popular file sharing site has shown that there are about 25,000 people trying to download the movie. 

I'm asking that anyone who reads this not be the 25,001st. And this includes those who, in the next four weeks before the movie opens, decide to make a trip across the Causeway to pick up a bootleg DVD of the movie.

Now, I have not seen the leak, nor am I downloading it as I write this. And no, I will not tell you where the site is so don't bother asking. And no, I don't secretly work for the studio either. So why am I writing this?

Because I want more comic book movies to be made.

As with the rest of the world, Hollywood is suffering, with almost all the studios cutting their film slate for the year, as well as laying off people. DVD sales are down and while it might be hard to sympathize with a business market that produces movies that gross over US$100 million, it is also this target that prompts a studio to decide to make more of such movies.

Ever since the first Superman movie came out in 1978, comic book movies have had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood and fans. Tinseltown loves making them, and fans, for the most part, simply hate how Hollywood does a bad job in translating their spandex clad heroes onto the big screen.

But a few years ago, things changed. Director Bryan Singer's X-Men did well enough at the box office to generate two sequels, while Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins eventually led to the production of last year's hit sequel, The Dark Knight.

Along the way, heroes like Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and even Superman made an impressive showing on the big screen. Naturally, there have been some bad ones like The Punisher (both of them) and Elektra but the point is, it is clear how Hollywood thinks – movies that do well at the box office deserve sequels or spin offs.

So what happens when X-Men: Wolverine opens in cinemas and comic fandom, alongside other members of the public, has already seen it? As it so happens, the comic book geek crowd the movie is targeting is also the same demographic that would possess the know-how to download the leaked movie.

If the movie tanks, it a safe assumption that 20th Century Fox will not greenlight Wolverine 2. Hugh Jackman will not be brandishing his adamantium claws on screen again, and comic book and movie fans will not get a chance to see him take on The Hand, interact with Alpha Flight or whatever comic book storyline the movie writers deem fit to adapt, in the character's brief 24-year history.

It's a simple argument really – download the movie now, watch it and you effectively kill James Howlett (that's Wolverine's real name by the way) – a feat that the villainous Magneto, Sabretooth, Apocalypse and Romulus have not been able to perform.

And that's not something to be proud of.