X-Men Origins: Wolverine

This is one of the best documented leaks in film history. An unfinished workprint appeared online on 31 March 2009, a month before release, and Fox estimated roughly four and a half million downloads before opening day. Gilberto Sanchez, who uploaded it to Megaupload, was sentenced to a year in federal prison, and the Fox News freelancer Roger Friedman was fired for reviewing the pirated cut. Years later the studio’s head of post production, Ted Gagliano, said the source was a preview copy rushed together for Rupert Murdoch with poor security. The looseness you will notice on screen has a documented cause. Shooting began before the screenplay was finished, and the Australian unit received new pages from Los Angeles, sometimes the night before filming. That is why the middle stretch plays as a run of character introductions rather than a story with a spine. Even the claws were a repair rather than a choice: among more than a thousand effects shots, some claws were rendered digitally because the physical props failed in close up. Not for: anyone arriving from the Deadpool films. The mouth sewn Weapon XI played by Ryan Reynolds is the finale here, and those later films exist partly to mock it. Jackman himself later conceded the picture ended up looking like a fourth X-Men.