Fox Swings the Axe at Friedman over 'Wolverine'

I've become overly fond of the made-up phrase "officially official" in the past year, although the reason why is simple: Stories with obvious outcomes take longer to play out than they need to. So while something might be official on Saturday, the period isn't on the end of the sentence until Monday. That's the case with Roger Friedman/Fox/Wolverine. For a decade, Friedman served as the entertainment gossip monger for Fox News.com. He ran afoul of quite a few celebrities in that time, and he was not one to retract a lot of stories, even when they officially officially played out differently than he reported them. But he downloaded Wolverine last week, watched it, reviewed it, and crowed about the great and wonderful world available to him through torrent services. Fox News' cousin under the News Corp banner, 20th Century Fox, was not amused. Like all the other studios, it is a strong opponent of movie piracy, and here was an employee of the same mega-conglomerate stealing its big summer movie. On Saturday, news came that Friedman got the ol' heave-ho. On Sunday, the blogger denied he had been fired, and so had Fox, telling Variety it was an internal matter the studio wasn't prepared to discuss. But now it's officially official: Roger Friedman got 86ed by Fox. It couldn't have come as a great shock to him. In fact, the only shock is that Fox used language in a press release that was almost congratulatory:

"Fox News representatives and Roger Friedman met today and mutually agreed to part ways immediately. Fox News appreciates Mr. Friedman's 10 years of contributions to building FoxNews.com and wishes him success in his future endeavors."

As for the film itself, the version leaked online was a work print, and Fox vows to find the source. But over the past week, the unfinished version was downloaded over a million times, according to Torrent Freak, and was the most downloaded anything on Pirate Bay. However, it isn't generally believed that the online availability of Wolverine will hurt the film that badly when it hits theaters, and even Fox acknowledged that most people who downloaded it download everything anyway, so they weren't going to pay to see it. I don't know that admitting it might not be a problem is the best way to combat piracy, but Fox has been in the propaganda business a lot longer than I have.