Piracy actually helped WOLVERINE?
A belated study suggests that the month early Internet leak actually helped it's impressive $85 million opening weekend.
"To my knowledge, Wolverine is the ONLY big-budget epic film that has been available on the internet weeks in advance of its opening"writes Reid Rosefelt, in a blog opinion piece which has spread across the internet faster than a celebrity sex tape over the past 24 hours. Rosefelt has attempted to put scientific methods behind a study of 20th Century's 2009 blockbuster X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to see if that early DVD-like quality workprint leak, which at once stage was predicted to be the doom of the picture, actually made any impact at all on the movie's opening.
It's a belated written response to an eight month old article by Matthew Belloni in The Hollywood Reporter, who claimed that although it was impossible to accurately determine how much the leaked workprint of Wolverine cost Fox, it was possible to hypothesise around four different estimated figures... Losses (millions) -$7.18 one million viewers times the average American ticket price of $7.18 -$15.75 The difference between the opening weekend of Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand -$14.1 Iron Man made $102 million over the same weekend in 2008. Iron Man had stellar reviews, but this sort of movie is critic-proof, right? $00 What if it has no impact? Maybe it is good marketing? We doubt it, but expect the pirates to crow about it Rosefelft writes... So what happened? Despite the file-sharing and poor reviews, the film opened to an $85 million first weekend gross. Not too shabby. As file-sharing is known to be detrimental, there was much chatter about how much more the film would have made if over an estimated million people hadnt seen it on their computers in advance.Rosefelt drew up a chart of how the opening weekend played out and it's worth pointing to the fact it beat the likes of Avatar, Star Trek and Watchmen, three movies which were frantically excitable fanboy projects and had tons and tons of marketing going into their releases. It even beat the last Harry Potter movie, and their legion of fans. Even Terminator Salvation, which was nowhere to be seen on here. Film Opening (millions) Theatres The Twilight Saga: New Moon $142.8 4124 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen $108.9 4293 Wolverine $85 4099 Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince $77.8 4325 Avatar $77 3456 Star Trek $75.2 3849 Fast and Furious $70.9 3461 Up $68.1 3766 Monsters Vs. Aliens $59.3 4104 Watchmen $55.2 3611 GI Joe $54.7 4007 Night at the Museum 2 $54.2 4096 Rosefelt further mentions that Wolverine was only ranked 9th on Torrentfreak's list of the top ten most pirated movies of the year, a chart which Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen topped. Is it therefore possible to assume that the added publicity from the early workprint leak, despite the scatching reviews, was actually a positive thing for Wolverine? And for those who will attempt to counter-claim by saying it dropped heavily after it's first weekend and ended way short of X-Men: The Last Stand's $234 million total because of the leak, I would say that fall was actually because the movie was garbage, and everyone who went to see it told their friends as much.