Tweet

If it hadn’t clocked in before midnight for April 1st, this story could have easily ended up in the slush pile that quickly fills up with every film site’s attempt at lying to their readers under the guise of playing a wacky prank. Guess what everyone: Christopher Walker is not going to be Green Lantern. He should be, but he won’t.

However, this bad boy came through the tubes under the wire. Apparently, and confirmedly, a DVD-quality, non-watermarked, sans time code version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine hit the internet with the force of a box of free TRON shirts in a Comic-Con crowd.

I don’t care to add to the ease of acquiring a totally illegal copy of the flick, so we won’t post links, but the event brings up a host of questions:

• How big an audience out there will care to download the film a month early instead of experiencing on the big screen?
• Can a leak this big have an impact on how post-production is done or how it’s monitored?
• Why aren’t people illegally downloading Prince’s new three-disc set instead?

I’m not sure anyone has the answers to these questions – any guesses would be almost pure speculation. We’ll have to wait a bit to see some numbers from torrent trackers, but there’s a potentially large group of onliners who wouldn’t have an ethical problem or a platform problem (seeing it on their Macbook screen instead of the big screen) with downloading the thing.

A ton of other sites have announced the news, but Aint It Cool went far enough to post a plea to its readers asking that they refrain from sending in “advanced” reviews of the film or commenting in talkbacks, spoiling it for others. Devin over at CHUD has a solid article examining a few ways that a leak like this might have gone down – focusing primarily on the post-production side.

Here’s where I go on a rant about how pirating this film is bad, especially in this particular economic climate, but I’ll spare you in lieu of saying that: all film lovers know that this shit isn’t cool.

What do you think? Would you download it? Why or why not? And isn’t it ridiculous that we have to either drive to Target, illegally download, or spend eighty bucks on Prince’s new joint? I know! Seriously.