You know who this Wolverine leak has hit hardest? Will.i.am. Everyone knows that he’s bad in it before it’s even out.

Second-hardest? Probably Hugh Jackman, the man who produced the movie, stars as Wolverine in the movie and is prepared to fling himself out of a helicopter to promote the movie. Will.i.am hasn’t commented on the Wolverine leak – the law states that he has to wait for Fergie to sing about her knockers for two verses before he’s allowed to speak at any given moment – but Hugh Jackman has.

And apparently Hugh Jackman isn’t too happy. Who’d have guessed?

This Wolverine leak has done no good for anybody at all. Roger Friedman’s lost his job because of it, 20th Century Fox stand to lose millions of dollars because of it, there’s less likely to be a spin-off sequel about the origin story of Bad Gandalf because of it and Will.i.am will probably never get another acting job because of it. Alright, so maybe not all the consequences of the leak are so terrible in retrospect.

A million people are said to have downloaded Wolverine so far, which puts the movie at exactly the point it didn’t want to be – yes, a million downloads equates to a potentially huge financial loss but, in terms of views, this only makes Wolverine roughly as popular as a YouTube video of kitten with a wellington boot stuck on its head. Whichever way you look at it, things aren’t looking good.

And Hugh Jackman knows this only too well. He had so much riding on Wolverine – not only was it going to prove that he could carry a big summer blockbuster, but it was also going to banish any lingering suspicions that – following all his flapping and squealing at the Oscars this year – he was gay. Or at the very least it’d make everyone think that he was an angry gay instead of a musical theatre gay. Whatever that means.

And now Hugh Jackman has spoken out about the Wolverine leak. As you may have guessed, he’s not thrilled about it – especially since it’s put the kibosh on his plans to promote Wolverine in such a moronically spectacular way that he was only a phantom pregnancy or two away from straying into Tom Cruise territory. People reports:

“It’s a serious crime and there’s no doubt it’s very disappointing – I was heartbroken by it,” Hugh Jackman said Wednesday about last week’s Internet leak of a work print of his X-Men Origins: Wolverine. “Obviously people are seeing an unfinished film. It’s like a Ferrari without a paint job.”

You can’t blame Hugh Jackman here – all he wants is for people to enjoy Wolverine the way it was meant to be enjoyed – in an overpriced, uncomfortable seat screwed to a surface that’s been covered with discarded gum, surrounded by 150 teenagers who all seem to be texting each other at the same time and then reading those texts back at the top of their voices. He’s an idealist, what can we say?

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This Wolverine leak is worse than anyone could have possibly feared – word has it the film’s actually quite good.

It’s a disaster! Wolverine was supposed to be terrible from start to finish, but now word’s got out that it might not be a relentlessly dismal parade of cinematic diarrhoea that’ll make you consider actual suicide, and heads are going to roll for it.

First up is Fox’s Roger Friedman, who positively reviewed the leaked copy of Wolverine and got the sack for it. Let that be a lesson – if you’ve watched Wolverine online, make sure you tell everyone it’s crap.

When Wolverine was leaked online recently, it kickstarted a chain reaction of events that could culminate in a genuine disaster. Are we talking about 20th Century Fox losing so much money from the leak that it goes under? No. Are we talking about the implementation of new Draconian internet laws? No. Are we talking about the fact that, with Wolverine hobbled by the leak, Transformers 2 will end up being the biggest movie of the year by some margin? Yes, yes we are. Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?

But that’s something to worry about further down the line. In the meantime, let’s focus on Roger Friedman from Fox, who’s just been sacked for reviewing the movie online. BBC News reports:

Fox News said that the company’s representatives and Friedman “mutually agreed to part ways immediately”. It said that Friedman’s behaviour was “reprehensible” and that it “condemned this act categorically”. The journalist wrote in his column on Thursday that downloading the 20th Century Fox film was “so much easier than going out in the rain”.

Yeah, and you know what else is easier than going out in the rain? Choking to death on some coins. You heard it here first, folks – watching Wolverine is about as fun as choking to death on some coins. Or something. Please credit that quote accordingly when you use it on the movie posters, Fox.

Anyway, the problem here doesn’t seem to be that Roger Friedman reviewed the leaked copy of Wolverine, or that he reviewed it positively. The problem seems to be that Roger Friedman didn’t seem to work out that Fox News and 20th Century Fox both have the word ‘Fox’ in the title. And, to be fair, he’s lucky that he only got fired for it – a mistake that colossally stupid should really only be punishable by some form of brain surgery.

Anyway, let’s lament the loss of a man we didn’t know from a website we didn’t read for writing about a film we don’t care about in the correct manner. And that’s by defiantly reviewing the Wolverine leak ourselves. Ready?

No, no we can’t bring ourselves to watch it. Christ, Wolverine looks wank, doesn’t it?

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You know how nobody cares about the Wolverine movie because it’s the fourth film in a creatively-exhausted franchise?

Well, guess what? Now people have a brand new, even more exciting reason to ignore Wolverine when it’s released – anyone with a computer can illegally download a high-quality copy of the movie from the internet. A copy of Wolverine has been uploaded to torrent sites a month before release, leaving 20th Century Fox bigwigs fuming.

Luckily for them, though, comic book geeks are notoriously unable to use the internet properly. Wolverine‘s secret lives on to fight another day!

There are basically three groups of people in the world when it comes to Wolverine – the mega-fans who’ll definitely pay to see the spectacle of the finished article at the cinema even if they’ve already watched it online, the casual fans who’ll watch Wolverine on their computers and then ignore the theatrical release, and those who care so little about Wolverine that they won’t download it or see it at the cinema but will dismiss it as rubbish on their sarcastic British-based entertainment blogs as if they were bloody experts on it.

That last one’s us, by the way. Shh.

Anyway, 20th Century Fox had better be hoping that the first group is the biggest of these, because the new Wolverine movie has already been leaked online to a number of torrent sites a month before its release. BBC News reports:

The high quality copy of the film has been uploaded to several file sharing and streaming video websites. The movie is incomplete, with some special effects still in need of fine tuning and green screens and wires attached to actors still visible. Since being uploaded to file sharing websites on Tuesday, more than 75,000 copies of the film have already been downloaded and reviews by users have started appearing online.

Apparently 20th Century Fox are furious about the leak, and are promising to prosecute the person responsible. But it’s Hugh Jackman who we feel most sorry for. His year was going so well – he was named as the world’s sexiest man and some idiot let him goon about like a hyperactive cartoon flamingo while hosting the Oscars – and now this.

Hugh Jackman has invested so much of himself into Wolverine that an online leak will cause him no end of pain. Just by making it available for free, the Wolverine leak automatically hurts the movie’s box office gross, which a) means that Hugh might have to do the unthinkable and agree to star in a sequel to Australia, and b) massively reduces the chances of 20th Century Fox making additional X-Men Origins movies about Vinnie Jones and that blue Frasier thing. Those were the ones we were holding out for, damnit!

On the plus side, it also reduces the chances of Will.i.am making any more films. So that’s something.

As for us, we won’t be downloading the leaked Wolverine print. Not because of ethics or because we think that movies don’t translate as well when viewed on a 10-inch laptop screen on a train. No, the reason that we won’t download Wolverine is because we’ve already seen the Wolverine trailer and, honestly, sitting through two minutes of interminable clenched-faced explosions was enough for us. Two hours of the bastard would probably finish us off.

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