Heh. So, funny thing. All of the big papers here ran their summer movie previews this week, and all of them commented on how the summer movie season keeps starting earlier and earlier with all of the big studios angling to beat their competitors to the punch and be first out of the gate. And, holy crap, they're right! Check out this week-by-week release onslaught:

May 1st: X Men Origins Wolverine
May 8th: Star Trek
May 15th: Angels & Demons
May 21st: Terminator Salvation
May 22nd: Night At The Museum 2
May 29th: Drag Me To Hell; Up

Yeah, yeah... You can squawk about Night At The Museum being in there all you want, but if any of those films fails to pull in at least a hundred mil at the box office I'll eat my shirt. Most of them will do so comfortably within the first week which, really, they're going to have to because there'll be something else coming down the pipe the next week, just waiting to steal their screen space.

So, good for you, studios. You guys really got going early. Way to one-up one another. Only problem being that the people who actually want to see these movies are all still in school and you were all so focused on May that, well, there's a whole lot of nothin' coming out in June, when the kids will have a whole lot more time. How barren is the actual start of summer? The release slate is so empty other than the Transformers sequel, that Oscar-winning foreign flick Departures is getting a limited run in the middle of the month. People, summer is when we go to the theater to watch shit blowing up, not to watch a film about a Japanese mortician. Bizarre.

Anyway, this whole early-jump thing may have gotten bitten in the ass, anyway, what with Wolverine leaking online prematurely. The suits have been remarkably cool about the whole thing, playing it about as well as they possibly can, but you've got to know that heads are going to roll over this, and with good reason. This is a big, expensive film - one designed to be a major money maker with little margin for error. And while I doubt that the leak is going to have a huge impact on opening weekend box office thanks to word of mouth being generally good, it is going to have a huge impact on casual walk-ups and repeat business. Think about it: if online piracy bites even ten percent of a big film's business, you're dealing with at least a ten million dollar loss. Ten million! And when that happens, people get fired. Lots of them. Like what happened earlier this week when Fox shut down their entire Fox Atomic division - the division that produced 28 Days Later, among others - laying off all staff and handling the situation with such class that employees only found out it was happening because they read it in Variety.

Listening to people talk about this stuff as tough it's some sort of victimless thing that hurts nobody makes me want to scream. I have friends who just lost jobs because of this stuff. Do the math, people: Studios make movies to make money. If the movies stop making money, the studios will stop making those movies. Ergo if you actually like movies - and if you're putting the time into downloading them, I assume you do - then all you're doing by downloading is poisoning your own well. The harder it is for these things to be profitable, the less of them will be made. So if you must download, at least try to download crap. Eddie Murphy has a new movie coming - I recommend starting with that one.