Fanboys Boycotting Wolverine in the Wild

Canada

Fanboys Boycotting Wolverine in the Wild

Fri., Apr. 3, 2009 11:50 AM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Twentieth Century Fox

Forget Magneto, Sabretooth and Mystique. Wolverine's real nemesis is a bit geekier and harder to track down.

The FBI, Motion Picture Associaiton of American and 20th Century Fox are continuing their probes into who exactly leaked a rough cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, vowing to go all out to find the perp and prosecute that person "to the fullest extent of the law."

The unfinished version of the prequel, dated March 2 and imprinted with the name Rising Sun Pictures, an Australian visual effects company doing work on the film, surfaced earlier this week, sending Fox into damage-control mode to minimize the leak's impact on the film's box office. Wolverine is set to open May 1.

For its part, Rising Sun is trying to deflect blame, insisting that it was never in possession of the full version of the Hugh Jackman-fronted flick.

"As we worked on individual sequences within the film, neither Rising Sun Pictures or its staff members have ever been in possession of a full-length version, so it would have been impossible for the movie to have been leaked from here," chairman and cofounder Tony Clark said in a statement posted on the company's website.

Meanwhile, Fox has found an group of unlikely allies: fanboys. Many of the movie's targeted audience are boycotting the bootleg Wolverine.

"We are encouraged," Fox said in a statement, "by the support of fansites condemning piracy and this illegal posting and pointing out that such theft undermines the enormous efforts of the filmmakers and actors and, above all, hurts fans of the film."

"You're doing yourself a disservice if you see the film this way," Ain't It Cool News' Jeremy "Mr. Beaks" Smith told the New York Daily News. "[The fans that download it] are going to make their judgment on what they see, and that's not how the director ever intended for the movie to be screened."

Rotten Tomatoes is also refusing to post early reviews. (While some notices have been less than kind, Fox News columnist Roger Friedman praised Wolverine, calling it the "big blockbuster of 2009.")

Fox, meanwhile, has ordered several file-sharing sites to stop hosting the illegal version and is assisting federal agents in their investigation, which has so far yielded only a handful of leads.

Where's Professor Xavier when we need him?