As I’m sure most of you know, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, poised to become this year’s biggest comic-book movie hit (the more so after Watchmen surprisingly, and undeservedly IMO, bombed at the box office), is on its way, as they say on Tee Vee, to a theater near you in the very near future.

As I’m also sure you’ve heard by now, bootleg copies of workprint versions have been making the rounds of the seedy underbelly of the intartubez for a while now, a situation made infamous recently when a Fox News film critic ended up losing his job over a review he wrote of an illegally-acquired copy.  (Imagine that, Fox News involved in controversy.  That never happens.)

Now, Fox is claiming they’ve come up with a way to coax even the pirates of the world into shelling out their eight bucks for Wolverine once it hits the multiplexes:  Multiple endings.

That’s right, folks.  Depending on exactly where and when you see Wolverine, the ending might be substantially (“bub-stantially?”) different from the copy that’s currently circulating around Bittorrent sites and other dens of dubious legality.  In other words, they’re going the route of Clue, the cult-favorite 1985 adaptation of the classic board game as a slapstick parody of whodunnit films.  That movie, you may recall, featured three separate versions of the last ten minutes, each containing an entirely different resolution to the central mystery, that theater owners could pick and choose among for various showings.  Thus, every time you went to see Clue at your local Cinemark or AMC Theater (not that many did, as the film was a significant flop upon its original release), you could theoretically have gotten a different ending each time.

However, Clue‘s triumverate of endings was intended as a gimmick, tying the film into the board game by sharing its central conceit of a murder with a different culprit/weapon/location every time you play.  With Wolverine, it’s just a way for the top mucky-mucks at Fox to pat themselves on the back, thinking they’ve managed to put one over on the Pirate Bay crowd.  Their line of reasoning seems to be, those who downloaded the workprint release will have no choice but to shell out to see the movie (whether in theaters or on DVD/Blu-Ray) in order to see the “real” ending.

That sounds good on paper, but if Fox thinks this is really going to work for their stated purpose, I’m afraid they’re delusional.  Really, all this will do is create a situation where several different versions of Wolverine will be circulating in the Torrentverse, rather than just one.  It’s also probably not going to stop anyone who downloaded the film in the first place from choosing not to go see it in theaters anyway; pirates, as a rule, generally tend to not pay real money for anything, no matter how many gimmicks you try to entice them with.  Lastly, there is a very real chance this could totally backfire on Fox from a PR standpoint, as word (however erroneous) could get out that they want the Comic Book Guys of the world to pay to see the movie multiple times in order to get the full story… and in the current economy, that can be construed as unconscionable, or at the very least a waste of increasingly-precious disposable income.  (That complaint, of course, will become moot once the DVDs hit the market, as it’s extremely likely they will include all the different endings as bonus features.  Even Clue, when it hit home video, did this, re-editing the film to include all three endings and separating them with captions like “That’s what could have happened, but how about this?”)

In short, this comes off (to me, anyway) as not much more than Fox capitalizing on the spread of piracy and using it as the pivot point of yet another selling point for their latest blockbuster.  At the moment, I can’t decide if it’s a brilliant piece of marketing strategy, or a legitimate misunderstanding of just how the undergound works.  I suspect it’s a mixture of both, in the end.

A for effort, guys, but I’m not so sure it’s going to work…

Related posts:

1. Comic Rundown: Wolverine Digs into The Summer
2. Big Mean Flash Gamer: Wolverine Adventure Factory
3. Spider-Man 4 Dead; Film Series Reboot Imminent
4. Jackson Spills the Beans on Halo Movie
5. Pirate Bay Going Legit?