I'm Still Sick! Well, Not Really But I Can Pretend!

Fine! I'll write something.

After all those days where my brain got to refresh, you'd think I'd have something of value to contribute tonight but I don't really feel like I do.

I did just read a kind of interesting thing about Wolverine on Ain't It Cool News.

Apparently, a very good quality studio workprint [their words, not mine - not sure what the hell that means] leaked onto the Internet for the Wolverine movie in the past day or so. So, all hell is breaking loose with people sending reviews off this print.

Good lord - what a nightmare this must be for Fox.

People are already highly suspicious of this movie's quality and somehow, someway a print has "leaked out." I haven't read any of the reviews and seem unlikely to but there seems to be only two possibilities here to me...

1] The movie's as bad as we all fear it is and a disgruntled Fox employee decided, "I'll show those greedy mutant hating fucks!" and tossed it out on the Interweb to KILL any chance the movie has at doing well. And "well" is a relative term here because for a movie like this, it needs to be measured in several hundreds of millions to be considered "well." That's Scenario #1 - and the one I feel is most likely.

2] Door #2 paints a rosier picture. Let's suppose for just a moment that Fox actually managed to create something that didn't stink worse than the shit on the bottom of a bowling shoe. Let's project that they know expectations suck for their movie and that buzz is in the shitter. Is it that hard to imagine that they'd leak it themselves to build the hype back up? Most of the people downloading it are fanboys who would run out to see it in the theaters anyways - especially if they like what they saw. Not so much of a stretch, huh?

That's one side of the story. The other is AICN's refusal to print reviews off the print.

Their official statement on it talks about the studios laying people off and piracy and all the key buzzwords to be "appropriate" on the topic... but then basically encourages people to say whatver they want in the "talkback" comments section. This strikes me a copout.

On the one hand, I think it's a noble position to say you won't post reviews of a pirated video. Good for you. If that's your decision, stick to it. Although, I'm sure a bunch of people will call them hypocrites because their entire success as a website is predicated on being able to get "the scoop" before the other websites, which basically requires people to rat out their employers and spill their guts about stuff that's not supposed to be public yet.

But I digress...

On the other hand... and you really need to read the article to get the full feel of this... but the section about how they can't/won't censor people in the talkbacks about it and the handwringing they act like they went through to reach that decision...

Just seems fake to me.

I love AICN to death and is at-least-daily stop for me but on this one, I think they're just doing a shiny bit of ass-covering.

Just the way I see it.