Copyright Law

What Leak? ?Wolverine? Rakes in $87 Million

By soulxtc

Proves piracy, and even swine flu for that matter, doesn’t hurt a good movie,

Last month a workprint of “X-Men:Origins: Wolverine? leaked to BitTorrent, and many in the movie industry worried that it would harm ticket sales, a fear compounded by the current economic downturn and the spread of swine flu.

Those concerns were unwarranted with news that the movie raked in an estimated $87 million in ticket sales this past opening weekend.

How it stacks up to other X-Men movies:

• X-Men (2000) - $54 million
• X2: X-Men United (2003) - $86 million
• X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) - $102 million

Many, myself included, watched the workprint copy, but knew its lack of special effects and visible tether lines would still make watching it in the theaters necessary to see the finished product 20th Century Fox insisted it wasn’t.

“I started watching it online but didn’t finish because it didn’t have any of the special effects,” said theatergoer Jason Nguyen outside of the AMC Burbank 16 before a Friday show. “It seemed like something you would just watch on the DVD after seeing the real movie. I just didn’t think watching that would compare to watching the finished one with all the special effects.”

Another point to be made is that many so-called pirates will still pay to see a good movie despite having illegally downloaded a copy. “The Dark Knight” was the most pirated movie of all time, yet still managed to rake in more than $1 billion worldwide.

So much for all piracy doom and gloom the MPAA insists file-sharing is responsible for.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).