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'X-Men Origins: Wolverine': Summer Movie Preview

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As the studio went into Defcon-1 damage-control mode, Fox's co-chairman Tom Rothman stood up to take the blame. ''Ultimately, it was this company's responsibility to secure the postproduction pipeline, and we failed,'' he says. ''What makes this different [from previous leaks] is it's a huge movie with a rabid fan base, and that it happened way in advance. That's the irony: It's not even close to a finished film.'' The studio notes that the pirated cut lacked most of the special effects and more than 10 minutes of crucial additional footage that was shot earlier this year. ''It's a criminal misrepresentation of the work,'' says Rothman. ''Gavin Hood is still over on the lot working on the film. It's not the same moviegoing experience to watch a half-assed version on a computer.''

At press time, the investigation, a collaboration between the FBI and Fox, has yet to turn up a culprit. Rothman insists the print could have come only from someone involved in the postproduction process, and that they're close to zeroing in on the source of the leak, although most industry insiders are less optimistic that an arrest will be made. ''I don't know that they ever catch these guys,'' says one producer who has had a high-profile film pirated recently. ''You never read about some guy going to jail for this for 20 years.'' Even less clear is whether the leak really will cost Fox ''tens of millions'' at the box office. The only comparable precedent is 2003's The Hulk, which was illegally uploaded onto the Web two weeks before release. Universal ultimately claimed the breach cost the film $100 million (some say the studio was seeking a scapegoat for the film's poor reviews; Universal execs had no comment). On the other hand, some insiders suggest that Wolverine may actually benefit. Industry tracking on audience anticipation for the film spiked after the leak.

Either way, both the studio and Jackman have an awful lot riding on the success of Wolverine — the latest incarnation of one of the most durable and profitable franchises in the studio's history. X-Men was the first major Marvel superhero comic ever adapted for the screen, and it's one of the most profitable in the genre. Each successive sequel has made more than the previous one ($157 million for X-Men, $215 million for X2: X-Men United, $234 million for X-Men: The Last Stand), a claim no other comics franchise of three or more films can make. Fox has at least a couple of other X-Men spin-offs in development, including a Magneto origin story and X-Men: First Class, which follows the mutants as teenagers. ''There is no property more sacred to us than X-Men,'' says Alex Young, Fox's co-president of production. Adds Rothman, ''We're not going to let the bastards win.''

Wolverine has a penchant for trash-talking and random fits of rage, which lend him a confident, dangerous allure that's helped make him the most popular mutant in the X-Men franchise and among the most beloved superheroes in the Marvel universe. After fans voiced complaints about his having gone a little soft in the X-Men sequels, the studio and producers Lauren Shuler Donner and Jackman seized the opportunity to give the character a whole movie in which he could be bigger and badder than he'd ever been before. Committing those ideas to film turned out to be immensely complicated. Young won't divulge the new film's budget but admits it's the franchise's priciest (i.e., higher than The Last Stand's reported $165 million). ''It's bigger in scale and size than any of the other X-Men movies. It's also more primal and visceral. We haven't even come close to this pitch of intensity and fury.''

To create that kind of rawness, Jackman pushed the studio to hire Hood, an art-house veteran who was hot off his 2005 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winning gang drama, Tsotsi — and who had shown a flair for gritty conflict and emotional intensity. But the South African filmmaker, whose next film, 2007's Rendition, would bomb, had no experience sorting out the tangled logistics of an F/X-driven summer spectacle like this one. Furthermore, Hood, who had served in the military, saw Wolverine as the superhero version of an Army vet with post-traumatic stress disorder — someone deeply ambivalent about his ability to kick ass. That dark take on the character sparked some intense debate within the studio about whether teenage moviegoers would want to be burdened with such heavy themes. ''Part of the challenge is to keep all of those ideas in a PG-13 environment,'' says Hood, 45. ''I'm not a tested big-movie director, and it has been a process coming to understand the differing positions of the people who have a major stake in the film.''

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