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THURSDAY AM UPDATE: Estimates now are that the Hugh Jackman film, the 4th in the X-Men franchise for 20th Century Fox, was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times from file sharing websites on Tuesday. This is a huge blow to the studio’s major summer blockbuster if those viewers don’t go to a theater to see the film. Meanwhile, the web piracy has created a lot of buzz around the pic, both positive and negative. The Internet is now filled with fanboy comments about whether Wolverine is any good. Despite the added publicity, this is a nightmare scenario for Fox.
2ND UPDATE: I’ve just been given this statement by 20th Century Fox:
“Last night, a stolen, incomplete and early version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was posted illegally on a website. It was without many effects, had missing and unedited scenes and temporary sound and music. We immediately contacted the appropriate legal authorities and had it removed. We forensically mark our content so we can identify sources that make it available or download it. The source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law – the courts have handed down significant criminal sentences for such acts in the past. The FBI and the MPAA also are actively investigating this crime. We are encouraged by the support of fansites condemning this illegal posting and pointing out that such theft undermines the enormous efforts of the filmmakers and actors, and above all, hurts the fans of the film.”
8:50 AM UPDATE: This is no April Fool’s joke. Instead, Fox executives are describing it to me as one of the worst piracy scandals they can recall, since it involves a major studio and major movie. The studio is understandably in a panic. With the film opening on May 1st, this leak could cause incalculable damage to the box office of the latest in the valuable X-Men franchise. The studio must find out who did this and punish him/her/them to the full extent of the law. Meanwhile, the Internet is on fire about this DVD-quality work print of Wolverine being leaked online yesterday. Twentieth Century Fox stresses it’s an old rough cut without FX, music, etc — so that may mitigate the damage because isn’t that why you see the movie in a theater anyway? The execs say it may contain a virus. But even if the studio claims that viewers of the pirated copy will age 20 years overnight, that isn’t going to solve the problem. Toughness will. And it looks as if that’s exactly what 20th Century Fox is doing to combat this piracy.
Coincidentally, this comes just days before U.S. Congressman Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, will hold a field hearing in Van Nuys on April 6th to assess the financial impact of global intellectual property piracy. On April 30 the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is scheduled to release its annual report on intellectual property policies and practices in other countries. Last year’s report placed nine major offenders on the USTR’s Priority Watch List, including China, Russia, Thailand, and Argentina. A RAND study released earlier this month alleges that organized crime is increasingly active in film piracy. Just one problem – that study was funded by the MPAA.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Saw it this morning and its not good at all. Rough cut or not no amount of editing or added fx can save it from the bad word-a-mouth its gonna receive.
Wow! That sucks. What kind wonky of security do studios have on their prints? A leak one full month before the movie’s release date. It’s serious indeed.
Nikki the virus thing is just Fox trying to scare off pirates by exploiting the recent “conficker” scare – its pretty pathetic and lacks any credibility with the tech savvy geek crowd who download these torrents.
It seems to me that they would be better off stressing the fact that apparently this print is missing up to 20 minutes of screentime (the recent reshoots?) and lots of fx work. What are these tentpole movies without the fx after all?
I’m not a big FOX fan, principally because of how they treat people who work for them. And their HR department appears dedicated to protecting and covering for executives – seems their only job.
But this seems like a very inside job. And it hurts everyone in the business.
The way movie editing seems to work lately is this acres and acres of hard drive bays for which films being edited are stored. These should exist on separate, isolated networks on the studio lot, so that they cannot be “leaked” via FTP or other modes of electronic transmission.
If FOX’s IT has insisted on a network link to provide “service” to the post/editing section then someone is going to have a LOT of egg on their face and probably heads should roll.
However, my suspicion is that it either happened in the editing suite, or off-site at the director’s offices. While it may not be that hard to walk out of a studio with a hard drive, the fact is it would be missed immediately.
And it would take a terabyte hard drive to copy this movie. Or someone would have to take an hour or so to burn a lower quality DVD of the data. And that takes time. Which means they could get caught. So I’m just wondering how this was done.
My bet is a director, assistant director, etc etc had a working copy that was left unattended. I really don’t believe FOX’s security in post or IT would have let this one get off the lot.
(Moi spent 25 years in IT systems and electronic data transmissions before becoming a psychotherapist.)
The fans who are eager enough to download Wolverine will go to see it at the cinema anyway.
But if the leaked version shows the film as being just plain bad and it gets panned by word-of-mouth (or word-of-blog), that could really hurt it.
Toughness? Is that really the answer, after the fact? How did it work when the RIAA sued downloaders?
The answer is not suing downloaders, it’s not frisking journalists for cameras at press screenings- it’s choosing your vendors carefully, and setting up a proprietary system of their working on the film, so that DVDs aren’t passed around like hotcakes months before the release of a major studio film.
Dylan brings up a good point.
It’s a very possible scenario that an executive might have been careless with the working copy rough cut, etc… Executives, anecdotally speaking, are known for demanding security for everyone but themselves….
I’d say the answer is to make movies that aren’t pieces of crap — all this demonizing of torrent dls is mostly fatcat greed. THE DARK KNIGHT seems to have done kinda okay at the box office, as well as TAKEN and GRAN TORINO — a recent example of three movies that were available in DVD quality torrent dls while or before they were in the theatres. The movie-going experience is crappier yet more expensive than ever, while ubergreedy hardware/software manufacturers insist on pushing blu-ray on the consumer at wildly inflated prices — during a recession. Off with their heads & long live the torrents!
I thought EVERYTHING was watermarked or coded somehow, so how this ended up being a clean print definitely points to someone deliberately trying to undermine Fox. I have no love for Fox, but hope they find whoever did this and stick them in a deep, dark hole for a very long time. This is awful.
Totally agree with “Dylan” studio security at press screenings and the like is ridiculous. Studios need to work on their “in-house” security.
Hm that kind of sucks.. I don’t know when it was due in the cinema? I’m not sure what effect it will have on box office sales but whatever.. Of course, the losses will be calculated by doing the total number of downloads x $10,- which is, RIAA style, totally unrealistic. I think that’s how they came to the $18.3 billion as well? I think that the majority of the people who download it would either not have cared enough to pay for it in the first place or actually buy a copy because they think it’s good stuff and they simply maintain a try before you buy policy. Anyways, still I think it sucks when a movie leaks on the net when it’s not finished, as some people who download it might not enjoy the unedited version and therefore get a negative opinion about the movie before it’s even properly finished.
Anybody know how I can watch it?
I dunno, Dylan. If you made it pretty clear within the industry that if caught leaking you would never work again, that would drastically reduce the number of leaks. The downloaders & journalists haven’t betrayed the film, the leaker has. That’s being “tough” on the person who deserves it.
Helen Hill’s suggestions are great, as are any that cut down the number of emotionally uninvolved people that have access to any material that would compromise the film. Most important is that all of the players involved in film are working in its best interests.
See, Studios? SEE?
Keep treating your employees like shit; this is just the beginning!
The fact is, the studios have not invested that much money in anti-piaracy in the last five years. I would bet Fox has spent more on making two Garfield movies than they have on filmed entertainment antipiracy in the last five years.
This effort needs to be as big and robust as the effort and energy being put into big media joint ventures like Hulu.
They should actively pump out corrupted files on these torrent sites that permanently FRY any computer they touch. This kind of thing is causing serious erosion in the value of ALL intellectual property.
Bullshit. If you look at the most recent studies for big budget movies that are leaked to the torrent sites, you will find that this does not stop them from seeing it in the theater. When will the studios realize that leaked films create demand, and most pirates still want to see a film in all its theatrical glory. I know it’s hard to wrap your brain around, but I think pirates are less of an enemy than one would suspect.
Call it a conspiracy theory but I think somebody in the production department was a Watchmen fan and ahh….. well you know Fox with the lawsuit and all.
That will learn them to stop making shitty movies
I’m not 100% convinced this will be a bad thing for Fox. They’ve been doing a heavy amount of work trying to alleviate fear that this movie is a stinker. If they actually believe in the product, and if the movie doesn’t suck, this will build buzz.
Of course, the odds that the movie doesn’t suck are slim…
Helen Hill your post is hilarious. No studio movie would take up 1 terabye of hard drive space. You do realize thats 1000 Gigabytes right? I’m assuming your over a certain age because you obviously don’t understand how advanced software tools have become. The process you saying would take 1 hour could do in 10 minutes.
This is the risk you take when all post production is done digitally. It is a lot harder to pirate strips of film. A one tera-byte hard drive is peanuts and easy to transfer from one to another. Its also very small. Just one click and you have a copy. Only takes a minute or two.
All digitally daillies and digital work prints could and should be done at a much lower quality level until the final cut edit. The final cut product should be done the old fashioned way, the way Spielberg still does it. Cutting and splicing celluloid film. Btw this is the way they did the Dark Knight. The old fashioned way. They made an optical print off the original camera negative. Cut and spliced the film.
When you invest hundreds of millions of dollars, it make sense. NEVER make a high quality digital copy until you release the Blu-Ray disk. Project film with a film projector. Old school.
Then you only have to worry about in theater piracy….
This really couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. There’s been panic at the studio forever about this film and if it is as bad as the torrent sites are saying, then a B.O. catastrophe is just another special karmic gift awaiting these a$$holes.
I actually find the reaction by the so-called “geeks” to this news much more fascinating than the news itself. If one ventures to the comments sections of AICN or HitFix and others, there seems to be a majority of people speaking out in the vein of “instant karma’s gonna get you”. That, more than anything else, would worry me as an executive, for it shows how much venom (rightfully or wrongly, that is a value judgement) is directed against Fox and its genre products by the people who should be their core audience.
It’s not the actual leak that Fox has to worry about.
It’s the moment some of those aggregators having downloaded the movie come out and state “it is horrible. Save your money. Don’t see it in the theaters”.
That could then be a disaster, since the movie’s core consumer group is incredibly webby, and they don’t like to be screwed with. The more core-centric a genre film is, the less the ability to play outside its core is (Watchmen, The Spirit, Punisher War Zone)… as opposed to movies that attract a wider potential audience, where it was proven without a shadow of a doubt that leaking a DVD Screener (Gran Torino) or a foreign DVD copy (Taken) had no effect on box office performance within the United States.
But that is the inherent danger of producing a product that is designed to appeal largely to this kind of an audience, you live by them… and they can kill you.
I watched the movie earlier today and I enjoyed it very much. The in-production issues like rough meshes, wires, coordinate points on greenscreens make it an even more interesting watch to get a glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes. This has a real special charme to it, knowing it is only interim and will be fixed in the final version of the picture. (Charming example: circles around the huge fingernails of the lurking wolfman with the added note “claws growing”.)
Inspite of it being a raw diamond with unfinished special fx, I liked it very much and can’t wait for it to hit the theatres.
While I haven’t seen the pirated copy, I agree with Richard and Mizzela. The people who would download the rough copy would still see it in the theater BUT the early footage/trailers look like an utter disaster and this copy could lead to some terrible word of mouth.
At least the people at Fox will not have an scapegoat if this film does indeed disappoint at the box office.