Fox Reports “Wolverine” Downloaded 4 Million Times

How many copies of the leaked “Wolverine” screener were shared via peer-to-peer networks?

Initially, it was reported the film had been downloaded just over a million times.   A new report yesterday by 20th Century Fox indicates the movie, which debuted in theaters last weekend, was downloaded four times more than initially reported.   Fox indicated yesterday the movie, which hit the Net around April 1, was downloaded four million times in a month.

The impact on the box-office take for “Wolverine” may not ever be known, but the Hollywood Reporter estimated the film could have lost $28 million in box-office revenue from the leaked version.  That figure was arrived at by using an average ticket price of just over $7 and multiplying it by the number of downloads.  What’s difficult to quantify in the equation is how many downloaders got a copy of the film and still went to see the film in theaters or will go in the coming weeks.

“Piracy is a serious issue for us. We now estimate that there are above 4 million downloads of that stolen ‘Wolverine’ movie that was up there,” News Corp. COO Peter Chernin told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.

Chernin, along with chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, were speaking on a conference call. A News Corp. spokeswoman later confirmed that the statistic was 4 million and not 1 million, the smaller number having been conventional wisdom for several days.

Chernin said on the call that many Internet sites illegally trading “Wolverine” have been shut down.

Piracy of intellectual property including movies, said Chernin, is “as big an act of industrial espionage, industrial sabotage, as we have seen in terms of its economic impact.”