I am pretty sure that everyone has heard about the latest assault to bring down the movie industry. No I’m not talking about them actually making good movies worth paying for but rather the leak to the web of 20th Century Fox’s upcoming release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yes folks the unforgivable (in the eyes of the movie industry) has happened and a very good copy of the movie has found its way onto the net.

As usual of course the beating of chests and proclamations of how bad this is being echoed through mainstream press online and offline media. Which is really funny when you consider the fact that the biggest downloads of movies on the web have also been some of the biggest box office winners.

Here’s the thing though. Fox had a perfect opportunity with this happening to almost totally turn around peoples perception of the movie industry. As Michael Masnick at Techdirt said

But, even so, instead of going all legal and threatening, the studio could have responded in a way that built anticipation to get people to actually go see the movie.

Why not be straightforward about it, saying, something along the lines of:

Hey Wolverine fans! We know that you’re all looking forward to the release of the movie next month. We’re excited too! By now you may have heard that an early totally unfinished version has been leaked online. It’s missing a whole bunch of stuff — including some amazing special effects — and honestly, this version isn’t a finished product at all. We think you’ll get a much better overall experience by waiting for the full finished product, but we certainly understand that some of you just can’t wait (trust us, we feel the same way!). If that’s the case, please, feel free to check it out, but please remember that this isn’t even close to the final version. If anything, think of this as a "behind-the-scenes" peek of just what a movie looks like before all the real "movie magic" gets put in there. If you do check it out, we hope you’ll join us May 1st to check out the finalized version as well on the big screen the way we intended for you to see this awesome movie. It’s just a month away!

Yet another missed opportunity.

And by the way the movie is great but the workprint copy floating around out there is very incomplete and has a lot of cleaning up to do with the special effects. Which raises an interesting thought – this release I think could actually encourage people to go see a great action movie if only two see how much it differs from the workprint release.

[photo courtesy of My Hollywood Dream]