Landmark Wolverine Leak Will Reveal New Lessons About Piracy, The Box Office And The Flow Of Buzz

This week’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine downloading “debacle” has to be one of the most compelling stories in movie piracy on the internet to date – fascinating on a number of levels. If you have missed the story to this point, Deadline Hollywood Daily is as good of place as any to start.

From a “where the rubber meets the road” standpoint, the most interesting, yet-to-be determination is how the estimated hundreds of thousands (within the first 24 hours, reportedly) of free, pirated viewings will affect the huge-budget film’s box office intake.

I do believe the word debacle needs to be in quotes, because how the bottom dollar will shift is deceptively murky. It is certainly not close to a “1 illegal download = 1 less ticket sold” equation.

Presumably, the biggest questions are:

1. How many ticket sales will be lost to downloaders who would have seen the film in theaters?

2. How much of an impact can the word of mouth from the early viewings have, positive or negative?

And the really interesting one to me:

3. Can the extensive publicity about the leak change interest and awareness? The adage that all buzz about a film is good buzz will severely be tested.

Each of these questions come with sub-questions, and there are other factors such as the quality of the illegal cut (some sites are reporting that it’s high quality, while film executives are making it sound more rough) and the timing of the leak (X-Men Origins: Wolverine releases May 1, so a month early). 

Not surprisingly, perspectives about the situation vary greatly. For instance, I found Clint Morris’s dire, pathos-laden take (on the site, Moviehole) a little over the top. Writes Morris:

“If you have downloaded the film, I hope you realize you're not just hurting the film's potential at the box office (but also possibly hurting the "X-Men" franchise as a whole - you do want to see the Magneto and First Class movies, right?) but essentially taking money from the pockets of the many men and women that worked on the picture.  You might as well raid their fridges and freezers of all their meat for the year, and on your way out the door take their wallets.”

On the other hand, some industry folks have been quoted as saying that the box office won’t be affected substantially. They’re basically theorizing that there isn’t a large cross section between those who would have originally paid to see the film, decided to download it illegally, and now will pass on buying a ticket.

Many other sites label the outcome unclear, which is exactly where I think we stand.

You can intelligently project the factors that will influence the road from point A (leak) to point Z (final box office tally), but there are too many variables interplaying to know the outcome at this point.

As Moviehole’s Morris eludes to, I feel a bit guilty about my level of fascination with this situation – there are decent people with a lot riding on this film who find it anything but amusing. Still, the simple fact remains that movie executives and marketers are going to learn a lot about the nature of both movie piracy and movie buzz from this incident.