Today, superhero movies are kept under strict lock and key until their release. Spoiling big surprises, cameos, or plot turns are considered so rude that social media campaigns like “Thanos Demands Your Silence” have cropped up to ensure folks don’t spoil the movie even after it gets released. Some studios even take this secrecy to extreme levels. As recently as two years ago, 2023’s The Flash screened at CinemaCon months ahead of its June release date featuring blurred out scenes obscuring spoilery cameos and even pieces of the ending removed entirely. Sometimes studios even leak their own false information to throw off fans and maintain secrets.
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The hope with these maneuvers is to ensure every moviegoer who sees a Marvel or DC movie will have a glorious time and get to experience certain thrills on the big screen where they were meant to be absorbed. In some ways, though, these practices seem like a way of ensuring that what befell one Marvel movie adaptation never happens again. 16 years ago, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still in its infancy, X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked online a month before its May 2009 theatrical release date, sending 20th Century Fox and the entire film industry into a spiral.
What Happened With the Wolverine Leak?
Everything that could go wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine went horribly hideously awry. What was supposed to start a new X-Men Origins series for 20th Century Fox instead became a nightmare as Wolverine director Gavin Hood and Fox butted heads over every step of the feature. The final film was so poorly received by fans and the public (particularly for how it butchered the character of Deadpool) that it would be incessantly parodied and skewered in the actual Deadpool movies. Meanwhile, subsequent standalone Wolverine movies with director James Mangold went in radically different tonal directions.
Everything was already going haywire for Wolverine before that fateful day on March 31, 2009 when a leaked workprint of this X-Men title hit the Internet. It cannot be stressed enough how rare it is for nearly finished or finished movies (the former case applying to Wolverine) to leak online before their proper release dates. The only other rare cases of this include award-season 2015 titles like The Revenant and The Hateful Eight leaking online days before their limited releases began and The Expendables 3 getting leaked days before its release.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was unquestionably the highest-profile example of this phenomenon and immediately raised questions about how Wolverine’s theatrical release would be impacted. While initially Fox executives claimed the leaked workprint didn’t include new scenes captured for reshoots, this turned out to be erroneous damage control. While promoting Deadpool & Wolverine 15 years later, Hugh Jackman claimed he’d been told that “10 million people have downloaded [Wolverine] before it came out.”
Clearly, everything connected to Wolverine was now chaos and that even extended to machinations within the Fox empire. Former freelance Fox News gossip blogger Roger Friedman infamously shared a review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine right after it got leaked, with Friedman getting fired shortly after the piece dropped. Late-night hosts across the country made endless jokes about the feature making its way to the Internet. This whole story would finally draw to a close two years later when the man responsible for uploading Wolverine to the Internet got a one-year stint in a federal prison.
[RELATED: Please Marvel, Let the Old X-Men Cast Members Rest]
What Was the Impact of the Wolverine Leak?
The X-Men movies initially had some problems resonating with moviegoers worldwide. Even 2003’s X2 grossed “only” $192.76 million overseas, while no entry in the saga hit $300+ million internationally until X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014. This online leak certainly didn’t help Wolverine‘s international box office chances, with the title eventually grossing $193.18 million overseas. That noticeable decline from X-Men: The Last Stand’s $226 million overseas gross could’ve come from some international moviegoers getting their Wolverine fill through that leaked print.
Other ways X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s leak impacted Hollywood are a bit more subtle and speculative, including how it seems to have inspired studios to beef up security over subsequent superhero movies. There’s certainly been no instance of post-2009 superhero tentpoles leaking ahead of their respective debuts like this Gavin Hood directorial effort. More ominously, this leak was a harbinger of how the often creaky and old-fashioned Hollywood landscape is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Five years after Wolverine, the 2014 Sony Pictures hack would occur and make the Wolverine fiasco look like a minor bump in the road.
This event also initially solidified how the live-action version of Wade Wilson/Deadpool was forever associated with internet leaks. Years after this inaugural flesh-and-blood incarnation of the character was inadvertently unveiled to the public through an unintentional leak, that Deadpool test footage would leak online and help inspire a proper green-light for the Deadpool movie. Internet leaks giveth and taketh away. Most importantly, though, this calamity was just the most high-profile way X-Men Origins: Wolverine became a boondoggle for all involved. No wonder subsequent X-Men movies would ceaselessly mock a project so tormented that leaking online ahead of its release isn’t its most infamous element.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is now streaming on Disney+.
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Image courtesy of Peacock
