Pirates Don’t Hurt Wolverine Opening

If you listened to the MPAA, you would think that the leaked “Wolverine” workprint from last month was going to cause some sort of disasterous damage to the film’s potential when it was officially released to theaters this past weekend.

Instead, “Wolverine” was far-and-away the biggest movie in the US this weekend, grossing $87,000,000 making it Fox’s fourth best results ever and the biggest opening of 2009, so far.

This truly begs the question, what the hell is the MPAA so upset about?  If anything, the leaked workprint raised awareness and interest in the film.  About the only thing I can see that really hurt the film’s opening weekend was a slew of mediocre-poor reviews from the critics.

Of course, the MPAA had a fit over pirated copies of “The Dark Knight” available online and that was the highest-grossing film of 2008, so expect them to spin this whole thing to make it look like P2P file-sharers will bring down Hollywood.

LINK

Pitchfork Goes Video

There is a good overview on NewTeeVee of the recently launched Pitchfork TV (warning: autoplay!).  Overall, they seem to be pleased if not impressed:

“Right now, Pitchfork.tv has a very small, intimate feel, which is best because the company would never want to be perceived as big and corporate. But as it has to start paying for all this video bandwidth, it will need to make adjustments (and add advertising) to remain viable. (Will it have to take on Chevy as an advertiser, or does American Apparel make pre-rolls?)”

The majority of the content, as one would expect, is music videos.  Unlike the original Pitchfork site, that trades mainly in very opinionated reviews, this is really just another site that happens to have music videos.  Sure, if you are into the mostly obscure taste that Pitchfork so loves, there is some good exclusive(ish) content, but there is not much else to say for the efforts.

As to how they hope to succeed in this crowded field without any embedding or syndicating (none so far) I guess they are hoping their niche is valuable to advertisers.  It doesn’t feel like a site that will break out beyond it’s natural (small) following.