Wolverine

So the other day I was out on the streets of Shanghai browsing through a street cart of DVDs and saw copies of "Wolverine" being sold. I don't really follow movie releases very closely, but I seem to remember seeing advertising for the movie recently. For that reason, I thought Wolverine was a recent release and when you see DVDs of recent releases on the streets of Shanghai, they typically are of very low quality. Usually they are copies of people recording the movie from a camcorder in the movie theater.

I asked the vendor if this was a good copy or a bad copy. He told me that it was a good copy. I told him that I did not believe him so he promptly whipped out a portable dvd player to show me the quality of the DVD. He played the first 2 minutes of the movie and indeed it was of DVD quality. So I plunked down my 5RMB (73 cents) and happily brought it home. I watched the movie the next evening and started to see some funny things. Certain scenes such as the overhead view of an island was composed of skeletal graphics. And some of the scenes that required special affects looks as if it was computer animation. In some of the fight scenes cables could be seen strapped to the actors to provide lift.

After the movie, I did some research on the movie over the internet and discovered that the release date is on May 1 which is 3 weeks from now. I realized that the copy of Wolverine that I just viewed was probably one of the pre-final versions of the movie. It seems that somebody on the inside must have made a copy of it and sold it to the DVD pirates.

I just spoke to a friend in NYC and found out that pirated copies of Wolverine has made it to the States. He has not watched it as of yet, so I wonder if the States got the same copy. My guess would be yes.

Digital age is a double edge sword.