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News Corporation chairman Peter Chernin told Wall Street analysts yesterday that the workprint copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine released on the internet at the end of March has been downloaded 4 million times. If you take the average price of a movie ticket (estimated by The Hollywood Reporter to be $7.18) and multiply by the download number that works out to a possible $28.7 million dollars of lost revenue for Fox.

So far no arrests in the Wolverine workprint leak have been made.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine has claimed the top spot at the box office on its opening weekend. According to Sunday estimates the film took in $87 million dollars, making it the second-highest opening for an X-Men related film. The film is playing on 4,099 screens across North America making an average gross per location of $21,225. [Full story]

Preliminary results for Friday's box office show that X-Men Origins: Wolverine slew the competition with an estimated $35 million dollar one-day take (including any early midnight showings.) Wolverine's opening day fared better than the opening days for the first two X-Men films (#1 took in $20.8m and X2 took in $31.2m on their Friday debuts) but not as well as opening day for X-Men: The Last Stand ($45.1m).

The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt has posted his review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and it's bad news for 20th Century Fox and the film's creators. In his negative assessment of the first X-Men movie spinoff Honeycutt calls the film "a keen disappointment as action and effects take over from a poorly conceived story."

Concerning Gavin Hood's direction of the film, Honeycutt states, "Hood is tapped to call 'action' this outing, ostensibly because his 2005 Oscar-winning film Tsotsi was about someone not comfortable with his own nature. But there is very little soul-searching in Wolverine -- almost none, in fact, as Jackman is constantly in motion and constantly shirtless, with a scowl above his bearded jawline being as close to deep thought as the movie goes. So a fine, sensitive director is more or less wasted in this action movie."

Read the full THR review.

Justin Chang's review of the film for Variety was less savage but still sharp-edged. Chang calls Wolverine "a sharp-clawed, dull-ditted actioner that falls short of the two Bryan Singer-directed pics in the franchise but still overpowers 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand."

And there are more problems. "Script also traffics in the kind of flat, shopworn comic relief that's become de rigeur for superhero fare -- mostly courtesy of mutant Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), a New Orleans cardsharp who teams with Logan at the midpoint," Chang states. "Absent from the X-Men movies until now, this rugged Southern charmer is one of the series' more popular characters, but his appearance here is poorly and arbitrarily integrated into the scenario."

Read Variety's review.

20th Century Fox has canceled Hugh Jackman's travel plans to Mexico to promote X-Men Origins: Wolverine due to the concern over the country's recent outbreak of swine flu. Jackman's no-show is just the latest in numerous cancelations of business and personal travel plans as concern mounts over the outbreak of what could eventually become a pandemic. Large entertainment venues such as sports games and movie theaters are closed to the public in Mexico in the hopes that it will curtail the transmission of the bug.

Perhaps in response to the leaked workprint of the film, 20th Century Fox is trying to boost the number of people that go see X-Men Origins: Wolverine by having multiple endings for the film. Depending upon which theater you go see Wolverine at, the ending that you watch on the screen may not be the same one that comes at the conclusion of that other print of Wolverine playing down the street.

And lest you be in doubt that this is an unconfirmed rumor, director Gavin Hood confirmed that there were multiple endings to his movie at a recent press screening of the film.

Apple has a new exclusive internet only trailer for Wolverine. If you've seen the earlier trailers then you've pretty much seen all of the material in this new offering but the presentation is what's being showcased.

Here's a photo showing Wolverine doing the second-best thing that he's good at: drinking milk. The latest promo image for the drink milk campaign shows a white-moustached Hugh Jackman done up as Wolvie, claws extended. You may recall last summer's milk ad campaign which used Batman or the one from 2006 that took Brandon Routh from Superman Returns and gave him the 'stache.

The ad copy reads, "My power to regenerate might be top secret but my ability to re-energize is simple. Milk has protein to help build muscle and a unique mix of nutrients to help you refuel. So eat right, train hard and drink lowfat milk. That's just common mutant sense."

Look for the Body by Milk ad to start showing up later this week in periodicals.

In part two of their interview with Gavin Hood, the X-Men Origins: Wolverine director goes into how he was originally approached by Hugh Jackman about the possibility of him directing the movie as well as how he researched the character and sifted through decades worth of stories to find the elements he needed for his film.

For the first time since the release of an unfinished cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on the net the film's star has talked about the matter.

"It's a serious crime, and there's no doubt it's very disappointing. I was heartbroken by it," Jackman told members of the Australian press assembled for a press conference about the upcoming release of his new film. "Obviously, people are seeing an unfinished film. It's like a Ferrari without a paint job."

Jackman also commended the online community for condemning the release of the movie. "The FBI are onto it, and they're taking it very, very seriously," he added.

He also spoke very briefly about his hopes for a second solo Wolverine film. "Since X-Men 2 there've been talks and I've been pretty public about my desire to go to Japan. The Japanese saga is very cool."

There was plenty of he said-she said over the weekend concerning the employment fate of Fox 411 entertainment columnist Roger Friedman. After the Fox News website pulled Friedman's early review for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, based on a leaked workprint, from the site a rumor published by blogger Nikki Finke surfaced that Fox had sacked him.

Follow-up requests for clarification from Friedman were met with strange replies and no one knew for certain what action Fox News had or hadn't taken.

However, this afternoon Fox News finally confirmed that Friedman will no longer be an employee of the company:

"Fox News representatives and Roger Friedman met today and mutually agreed to part ways immediately. Fox News appreciates Mr. Friedman's ten years of contributions to building foxnews.com and wishes him success in his future endeavors. Mr. Friedman is grateful to his colleagues for their friendship and support over the past decade."

On a related note, BitTorrent is reporting that over one million downloads of the leaked Wolverine movie have taken place since the film was uploaded to the net late last week. [Related story]

Sometime Friday evening Roger Friedman's early review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, based on the leaked workprint on the internet, was pulled from the Fox News website. The studio behind the film issued two statements that have run on websites about Friedman's article and the company's view of it.

First, IESB published its response from Fox:

"We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com – an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox -- watched on the internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically -- whether the review is good or bad."

Second, HitFix received this statement from the company:

"Roger Friedman's views in no way reflect the views of News Corporation. We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. Once we learned of Roger Friedman's post we asked Fox News to remove it, which they did immediately."

In a video interview with The Hollywood Reporter, X-Men Origins: Wolverine director Gavin Hood addresses the internet rumors that he and Fox president Tom Rothman had a verbal war of words over the creative direction of the film. Hood claims that the creative relationship he and Rothman had never degenerated into screaming matchs and that fan rumors that Rothman wanted to sink the X-Men franchise are absolutely ludicrous. "We certainly never yelled at each other...It's quite upsetting to see how these things spiral," Hood states.

"There were disagreements but they were handled I think with dignity and sincerely as how should we best proceed."

In the last 48 hours there has been many news stories about the illegally released, high-quality workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine dumped on the internet. 20th Century Fox, the FBI and the MPAA all have launched their own internal investigations into how the file got dumped online, and Fox has even gone so far as to commend the online fansite community for not condoning the release of the Wolverine print.

Which makes what Fox columnist Roger Friedman did all the more unbelievable. In his column published yesterday the Fox News film journalist actually comes right out and reviews X-Men Origins: Wolverine based on the leaked workprint copy available on the net. "Yes, I’ve seen X Men Origins: Wolverine, Friedman starts off his column saying. "It wasn’t at a screening, either. I found a work in progress print of it, 95 percent completed, on the internet last night." And as if to show how much his understanding of how the internet works, Friedman adds at the end of his first paragraph, "Let’s hope by now it’s gone."

Friedman continues, "Right now, my 'cousins' at 20th Century Fox are probably having apoplexy. I doubt anyone else has seen this film. But everyone can relax. I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned out. It exceeds expectations at every turn. I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer."

He then spends the next couple of paragraphs praising the performances of the film's stars as well as the direction of Gavin Hood. "This may be the big blockbuster film of 2009, and one we really need right now," Friedman states. "It’s miles easier to understand than The Dark Knight, and tremendously more emotional. Hood simply did an excellent job bringing Wolverine’s early life to the screen." [Full story]

In the early evening hours of March 31 someone leaked a 108-minute work-in-progress, high-quality version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on to the internet.

While copies of high profile releases have been leaked online before, most notably Universal's 2003 release Hulk which was available for download two weeks before its June release, this is the earliest ever that a big-budget summer release has been available for pirating; the movie isn't scheduled to open in theaters until one month from today.

The quality of the image is at least as good as a DVD. While certain scenes do not have their completed effects and wires are still visible on the actors for their action scenes during some moments, the film can still be watched and the storyline understood. It's generally believed by most movie websites (including this one) that not all of the reshoots filmed this past winter are included in the leaked cut.

"We forensically mark our content so we can identify sources that make it available or download it," a Fox spokesman told Variety in their coverage of the story. "The source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law -- the courts have handed down significant criminal sentences for such acts and the last person who committed such a crime is still in jail."

Furthermore, in their piece covering the event The New York Times is reporting that the F.B.I. and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are both investigating the illegal act. Speaking with an expert on downloads the Times is reporting that the Wolverine movie has been downloaded "in the low hundreds of thousands of times in its first 24 hours on the internet."

How this leaked copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine will effect the film's opening box office remains unknown. [Related story]