Downloads of the pirated version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine have now topped four million, Fox execs said on a conference call on Wednesday. That’s a huge jump from the one million downloads estimated the first week after it first appeared on Bit Torrent sites a month ago (see “Over One Million Wolverine Downloads”).
The film debuted at #1 last weekend, and even at an $85 million adjusted box office had a huge opening. But some estimates before the opening were as high as $100 million. It’s unclear to what degree the pirate version impacted the box office, but it certainly seems likely that at least some of the four million people who downloaded the film decided not to pay to see it again in a theater after they watched it on their computers.