Growing up — and I’m not proud of this — bootlegged DVDs were kind of a staple in my family media console. It was 2009, piracy was at its peak, and all those “You wouldn’t steal a car” ads were less the lovable meme they would become, and more of a nuisance ignored outright. So yeah, we had a few, the most infamous being a copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The pirated version of that film was very different from your average cam rip. Save for its unfinished visual effects and a temp soundtrack standing in for the score to come, it was basically DVD-quality. Most crucially, it first circulated months before the film was set to hit theaters in the U.S. That’s because it had somehow been leaked directly from Fox studios... ripped, of all things, from a preview copy prepared for Rupert Murdoch.
It’s not that piracy has completely dissipated in the decade-and-change since Wolverine leaked online, but this scandal felt like the beginning of a turning point against the phenomenon. The act of pirating films has gone a bit underground, migrating almost exclusively to online torrent sites. In the late 2010s, it was more about prestige TV, with episodes of Game of Thrones or Orange is the New Black popping up online way ahead of schedule. Still, it’s been a while since a DVD-quality leak of a high-profile film has leaked ahead of its theatrical release — that is, until now.
