Media that finds its way online before their intended release have always been a part of the file-sharing community. Known as prereleases, big named movies that appear on BitTorrent or the Newsgroups are always high profile cases. Some of the most anticipated and popular movie events are landmark cases in prerelease history. The March 31st leak of” X-Men Origins: Wolverine” one month prior to its scheduled release goes down as perhaps the most significant of these events. According to online sources, the movie is incomplete but watchable. Many of the special effects are supposedly unfinished, as wires holding the actors are apparently still visible.

When a movie such as “The Love Guru” is prereleased, the event causes some stir, but the circumstance is incomparable to the investment placed in movies such as X-Men or the Star Wars prequels. As a result, when a movie such as Wolverine is found floating around BitTorrent, just about every mainstream media resource is reporting the story. The frenzy surrounding the prerelease of Wolverine is the most intense and on par with the prerelease of the Star Wars prequels and Ang Lee’s 2003 “The Hulk”.

That’s because Fox has a lot riding on this movie, about $150 million by some estimates (actually budget figures haven’t been released). The major question then becomes, what impact will Wolverine’s unprecedented 1 month prerelease have on the studio’s ability to not only see a return on their investment, but to make all the trouble worthwhile and make a decent profit?

To know the answer to that question, we’ll need to take a look backwards at some milestone prerelease events. The most significant and comparable prerelease events are the early arrivals of “Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (AOTC)”, Ang Lee’s “The Hulk”, “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith(ROTS)”, and “American Gangster”.

The 2002 release of AOTC was preempted by this film appearing online about 2 weeks early. This was the first time a big budget movie was available to wide audience. In 2002, BitTorrent wasn’t nearly as popular as today; however, there were other mechanisms, such as FastTrack and the Newsgroups that provided a popular avenue for this film’s distribution. Additionally, broadband had begun making significant inroads, which made downloading a large movie file (700 MB or more) more practical.

Although George Lucas and the studios were furious at the film’s leak, AOTCs had no problem recouping its $115 million investment. AOTC opened #1 in the North American box office, and reaped nearly $650 million in worldwide revenue.

Date: 2009-04-03 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1847