14 DAY TRIAL // For a while now, Jennifer Lopez has been promoting her latest film, a romantic comedy that sees her as a pregnant woman who happens to find the love of her life a few months too late. With only days to go until the official release of “The Back-Up Plan” in movie theaters, a high quality version has leaked online and is available for free download, Cinema Blend informs.
As was the case with the much-hyped “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which ended up online in complete form, save for a few special effects towards the end, a whole month before the official release, with “The Back-Up Plan” too the question rises of how this will affect sales. What’s more, what chances does a rom-com stand, as compared to an action movie which also featured superheroes, several movie-oriented publications are saying. Sadly, the answer to that could be: none.
“[T]he upcoming Jennifer Lopez film The Back-Up Plan has bean leaked online and is making the rounds through the BitTorrent system. According to the report, the copy of the film is high quality as it was ripped from a DVD screener. The film has experienced three release delays already and is scheduled to arrive in theaters this Friday,” Cinema Blend reports. The e-zine then launches into a comparison between “The Back-Up Plan” and “Wolverine,” eventually concluding, more or less joking, that this more recent leak could be an excuse for when the film flops.
“While X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a film version of comic genocide, the leak made sense because, and pardon me for stereotyping, geeks like comic books and downloading movies. So what the hell are they doing watching what appears to be a cookie-cutter romantic comedy? Perhaps it is time for me to put on my conspiracy theory hat and say that CBS leaked the film themselves, so that if it does poorly they just blame those damn pirates. It’s not exactly a new strategy,” the same publication argues.
Then again, “Wolverine” actually made a kill at the box-office despite the leak and even given that it was trashed by both critics and fans. Still, for the sake of keeping things real, chances of “The Back-Up Plan” making $180 million in the US alone, as “Wolverine” did, without the leak were pretty slim from the very start, it is also being said.