Piracy is not always a bad thing...

Recently, upcoming Blockbuster X-Men Origins: Wolverine suffered a heavy blow as a leaked workprint copy of the film was leaked onto the internet. Within a week of this leak, over a million people managed to watch the copy - DVD quality, yet lacking some special effects.
However, although this is seen as a blow to Twentieth Century Fox, meaning box office revenue could suffer greatly now that millions of dollars have flown right out of their pockets, take a second to step back and think of the one gawping positive from all of this.

The key to success, in the media, is distribution. Films such as Cloverfield made it big through online distribution coming in the form of social networking websites such as Myspace - by the time the film made it onto the big screen, millions were flocking to the cinema in the opening weekend to a low-budget film that would, without distribution, be cast off as a Blair Witch wannabe. In the same way, feature films pump millions of dollars into advertising. Some lucky producers/directors/actors even make it onto hit TV shows or radio programmes to further promote the film. And it is this that companies try to hit the most, yet it is also this that is the hardest way to promote a product. Free advertising. Coming mostly in the form of other people - be it from television, radio, or press. And it is for this reason that Fox really shouldn't be worried. All this hype about a workprint being leaked has surely done one thing for cinema enthusiasts, families, first-daters and sunday-afternoon-boredom-curers - created a craze. One million people managed to see the workprint. The population of England is 61 million. That still leaves 60 million people unmanaging to watch the film. Now think of the countless other countries, and hundreds of million cinema-goers, that have still to see the most anticipated film this side of Easter...