According to a report on Deadline Hollywood, Fox News parent company News Corp., fired longtime Fox411 gossip columnist Roger Friedman after he wrote a review of a stolen copy of the hotly-anticipated summer blockbuster, X-Men Origins: Wolverine starring Hugh Jackman.
News Corp. is also the parent company of 20th Century Fox, which owns the distribution rights to the movie.
Last week, the blogosphere was all a buzz after someone posted an illegal DVD quality print of X-Men Origins: Wolverine online. By weeks’ end, ecstatic X-Men fans had downloaded “hundreds of thousands” of illegal copies from file sharing websites.
Friedman was not only one of those fans who watched the stolen movie online, but he also bragged about doing so in his popular column on Foxnews.com.
In what his bosses felt was a “blatant promotion of piracy,” Friedman wrote:
“I did find the whole top 10 [movies in theaters], plus TV shows, commercials, videos, everything, all streaming away. It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer. Later tonight I may finally catch up with Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man. It’s so much easier than going out in the rain!”
It’s hard to believe Friedman didn’t realize he was committing career suicide when he wrote about being “riveted to his chair” while watching the leaked movie online. As Kris Abel points out on his tech blog, “Reviewers in this industry have to go through great lengths to gain the trust of publishers in order to access their materials before launch date.”
When 20th Century Fox contacted Fox News’ Roger Ailes on Friday (3/3) about Friedman’s post, Ailes immediately deleted Friedman’s post from Foxnews.com. Friedman was terminated later that same day.
“He promoted piracy. He basically suggested that viewing a stolen film is OK, which is absolutely intolerable. So we fired him,” a source told Deadline Hollywood Saturday. “Fox News acted promptly on all fronts.”
Meanwhile, 20th Century Fox is calling this major studio breach the “worst piracy scandal they can recall.” Fearing an inside job, alarmed studio heads are working closely with the FBI to catch the culprit and punish him to the fullest extent of the law.
The 4th installment in the X-Men franchise is scheduled to open in theaters on May 1st.
