DVD quality workprint of WOLVERINE leaks online
In what appears NOT to be an April Fool's day prank (remember... last night I said I wasn't going to run them), a high quality workprint of 20th Century Fox's May 1st summer blockbuster, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, has leaked online. 
The full length, DVD like quality, print is near-finished marred only by a few unfinished FX shots. In addition, theres no timecode, no watermarknothing. Its a clean, perfect copy. - according to Drew McWeeny at Hitfix. A further update by the guys at Spill.com claim the workprint is the one 20th Century Fox screened and deemed not good enough to be released, pumping more money into the production so Gavin Hood could re-shoot scenes and improve the final product. The workrpint is available to anyone savvy enough to know how to download from bit torrent and rapidshare type sites, which basically equals the majority of the 18-35 year old male target audience for these Marvel productions. It's not hard to imagine a big portion of it's core audience will see the film a good month before it is set to be released. That's a long time... and rotten word of mouth can spread very quickly, especially for a production the size of this one. Just ask Eli Roth. His Hostel 2 project was hampered by something similar when a critic ripped the sequel to shreds by reviewing an unfinished work copy and, as a result, Roth's movie was never to recover at the box office. And to think that was just a relatively small horror film... Wolverine is one of the major releases of the year. Time will tell, of course, just how much signifiance today's events will have in the grand scheme in relation to internet privacy and the way studios deal with it's ties to online media. This is new territory, the first time a production of this size has been leaked. We have become accustomed to the Academy Award screeners leaking and sometimes I dare say they actually help the film's in question but, in this case, I'm not so sure. The most recent blockbuster release, Watchmen, was hindered by bad critic reviews which was later to be seen as a mistake on Warners Bros part to boastingly show so many people. You just can't see how Wolverine, a movie marred by so many production problems, is going to be able to survive such an accessible glimpse into the workprint of thier film, the majority of which will have made the final cut. It's obvious the leak has come from within, there's no doubt to that. But the consequences in the long run, well we'll have to just wait and see. We've never had a situation like this before.