Responding to the online Wolverine leaking, HE reader JckNapier2 has floated a highly speculative, bordering-on-looney-tune theory that’s nonetheless fascinating to consider: “If Wolverine turns out to be terrible, immediate suspicion would fall on 20th Century Fox for leaking it to create an excuse for [a diminished] box-office performance. When I first wrote this I was just tossing it out there. But as a friend correctly noted, this could be a form of insurance fraud.

“If Fox has insured the film from all matter of maladies, could they cash in said insurance policy if they can somehow convince the carriers that the film flop because of third-party criminal action?

“As it is, if the film is a hit despite today’s leak then it becomes a goofy embarrassment. If the film flops, especially on opening weekend, the leak becomes one of the biggest entertainment stories of the year, period. As far as consequences, the only people responsible for this are the ones who leaked it, period. If Fox cracks down on critics and press screenings and/or public paid screenings, then there will be a huge press backlash.”

Another reader, continuing on this double-agent, cloak-and-dagger Le Carre jag, says “it’s more than likely that it was an ex-Fox employee who was attached to the production while there. In fact there’s a guy who fits the mold well.” He doesn’t mention a name. “Check MTV’s movie blog for quotes about Wolverine by an exFox vp. “I’m not saying it’s him but the timelines for the estimated age of work print and his departure do match up, more or less. Read his quotes back then had me scratching my head as to why an ex employee was giving quotes on a film he was effectively thrown off of. Just a thought.”

I like the insurance fraud scenario better.

Reminder — Russian president Dmitri Medvedev‘s last name is pronounced “Med-vyed-dyev.” That’s five syllables. Here’s a site with some aural coaching.

Arizona Star columnist Phil Vilarreal notes that “if you want access to Blu-rays with your Netflix account, expect to pay $4 more per month. That means if you’re like me and subscribe to the 3-discs at a time plan, your monthly cost will shoot up nearly 25 percent, from $16.99 to $20.99. Netflix recently informed customers about the rate hike via e-mail.

“Obviously this is no choice at all for HDphiles who need to feed their PS3s and 50-inch plasmas with the cutting edge of visual technology and see DVDs as repulsive anachronisms, hardly preferable to VHS.”

“But if you’re not entranced by 1080p it would be foolish to consent to the $4 tack-on. Upconverted DVDs look pretty damn good, after all, in 480p. I see this as a move by Netflix to get people to stop asking for Blu-rays and thus justify no longer having to carry them.”

I didn’t get around to checking the pirate sites until an hour ago, and it’s true that several digital workprint copies and at least one DVD rip of Gavin Hood‘s Wolverine (20th Century Fox, 5.1.09) are downloadable as we speak. They all appeared earlier today; the DVD rip went up only about an hour ago. Clearly someone in the post-production loop is the culprit. I don’t know what kind of effort the big distributors put into post-production security, but it clearly hasn’t been enough.

Has anyone in an all-media press screening ever been caught trying to tape a movie? Ever? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened. I’m just asking.

I haven’t looked at any of the pirated copies, but HitFlix’s Drew McWeeny has reported that he looked at “a random three minute segment from the middle of the film this afternoon when first told it was online, and there’s no timecode, no watermark…nothing. It’s a clean, perfect copy. Someone did that on purpose.”

I agree with McWeeny and Nikki Finke that it’s hateful and deplorable when this sort of thing happens, and that it’s bad all around for everyone.

In a Wrap column posted last night, director Rod Lurie (Nothing But The Truth) has ripped into Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke as a “de facto McCarthy,” “destructive and dangerous, “carelessly lobbing accusations and innuendoes against unsuspecting victims,” “wing[ing] around rumors as if they were fact” even as she “protects her integrity by acknowledging up front that this is something she’s heard” and “very often [reporting stories with] agendas or scores to settle.”

Lurie initially ascribes the afore-mentioned characteristics and tendencies to a new gang of reporter-bloggers who “purport to run news items — ‘scoops,’ as they call them — in a shoot-first-and-do-the-interview-later kind of way…with in most cases no editors or lawyers to vet a story — either as a fact-checking measure or to determine whether there is exposure to a libel lawsuit.”

But his real focus is Finke due to her having reported two untrue things about him — one, that he’s hopscotched reps (i.e., has been skittish, temperamental and disloyal with his agents) and two, that he wanted to include a “rough sex” scene between a U.S. President’s daughter and a Secret Service agent in Commander in Chief, the TV series he created. So let’s cut out the qualifications — this is a Lurie vs. Finke piece. And Lurie is saying Finke “is emblematic of a true danger that now exists in journalism — the unchecked reporter.”

Lurie’s most provocative statement is that “there will soon be a revolution in legal Internet journalism. It simply cannot stand that reporters can just willy-nilly report rumors as fact. When that happens, reputations and careers can be destroyed at the whim of the reporter. Something has to and will happen or the entire institution of journalism — which will soon become almost exclusively Internet journalism — will be dead and buried.”

A journalist friend asked me the other night why I hadn’t jumped into the recent Finke-Variety-Wrap brouhaha more strongly. I guess it’s because Hollywood Elsewhere is a personality-opinion-attitude column, and so in terms of this one distinctive bent or tendency — a constant vetting of personal likes and dislikes, faves and devils — HE is similar to Deadline Hollywood Daily.

Unlike Finke, of course, I rarely beat the bushes for news story exclusives. I generate reviews, elitist or curmudgeonly snark, festival coverage, seasoned perspective, tough opinion, cultural complaints, standard movie-love (in feature, DVD and Bluray form), superb photographs, video and mp3 recordings, and all kinds of bizarre head-trip humor riffs — including reactions to hotel managers who fail to discern the meaning of a left-behind cowboy hat and pink-shirt restaurant managers who lack the grace to allow a customer to eat a slice of his own cake that he brought along in a bag.

But when exclusives do fall into my lap (a) I always make sure the facts are as throughly sourced as possible (and if I make a mistake, I fix it as soon as possible) or at least state that what’s being posted is merely the perspective of a known and trusted source, and (b) I always run said stories without naming the source. If I run someone else’s view of a situation or a film or Bluray disc, it’s because I agree with it or feel it at least has some merit. I think I’ve shown pretty good judgment on these matters as well as aesthetic-cultural issues. In any case, them’s the rules.

One definition of a Nikki Finke target is any form of old-boy sexism — any evident regarding of women as objects first and fully proportional and spherical human beings second. A good thing to be against, but Finke’s zeal in this regard can be nothing short of ferocious.

She tried to hurt me a couple of years ago by posting a single stupid-icky paragraph I included in a 15-paragraph letter that I’d privately sent to 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold , which had been given to her by an ally of Lionsgate marketing chief Tim Palen. Why? Because first and foremost, I believe, there’s something toxic in her soul that prevents her from acting in a more considerate, comme ci comme ca fashion (what she did was appallingly un-mensch-like), but secondly because she considered me a sexist dog and therefore needed to be slapped down.

I suspect that her animus toward Lurie was fostered along the same vague lines — i.e., that because of Lurie’s fictional interest in including a “rough sex” plot point in a TV series he must be a sexist and therefore needed to be slapped around.

Finke hasn’t posted anything about Lurie’s piece on DHD so far, and probably won’t.

A Michael Fleming Variety story quoted by In Contention‘s Kris Tapley announces that Chris Nolan‘s Shadow of the Bat, his third and final Batman film for Warner Bros., will open in the summer of 2012. It also contains two major-league shockers.

Pic will once again use the Riddler as the prime villain — the third go-round after Frank Gorshin‘s Riddler on the ’60s Batman TV series and Jim Carrey‘s Riddler in 1995’s Batman Forever. The surprise is that Carrey will again play the role in Nolan’s Shadow.

The other “come again?” is that directors Tim Burton, the creator of Batman and Batman Returns, and Joel Schumacher , helmer of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, have been brought on as consultants to the production.

“Tim and Joel had two completely different visions of the Batman, visions that contrast vastly with my own,” Nolan told Variety. “But I don’t feel that negates the possibility of a creative convergence. Batman is more than the ideas of one person, of one team of artists. He is the result of seven decades of pop culture influence and innovation.”

WB is sadi to be eyeballing a May 2012 release date to coincide with the 73rd anniversary of Batman’s first comic book appearance in 1939.

Nolan begins shooting his latest film, Inception, with Leonardo DiCaprio later this year for a 2010 release.

“It wasn’t until the 20th century that modern-type sunglasses came to be. In 1929, Sam Foster, founder of the Foster Grant company, sold the first pair of Foster Grant sunglasses on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ. By 1930, sunglasses were all the rage.” — from ideafinder.com‘s page on sunglasses.

Robert Downey, Jr., as Sherlock Holmes — fictionally born in 1854, first appearance in an Arthur Conan Doyle story in 1887, etc. It’s fairly safe to say that shades weren’t around during Holmes’ youth or middle age. Unless, of course, Holmes invented them.

I knew something was wrong last night when a friend and I walked into Sant Ambreous, a little restaurant at the corner of West 4th Street and Perry Street. It was around 9:30 pm. The atmosphere felt a little too stiff and formal, and they were all too glad to see us. Restaurants that have their act together never show excitement when a customer walks in. It’s always a sign of desperation. They need to just smile and keep their zen cool.

On top of which the waiters wore pink shirts with black ties. Village restaurants should always use waitresses who look like Sylvia Plath and who wear black leotard tops or somewhat tight sweaters, or…whatever, young, sharp-looking guys who may or may not be gay but who look it. But nobody wears ties — what is this, the Radisson in St. Paul?

Another trouble sign was that the bartender, a young girl from Brazil, spoke with heavily-accented English, and a little too softly. Bartenders always look you in the eye and speak plainly and with confidence, like a banker.

A voice was telling me to leave right away but we stayed because it was cold out. The voice was actually screaming at me to leave. As Lawrence Tierney‘s gangster character said in Reservoir Dogs, “When you’ve got instinct you don’t need proof.”

The pasta I ordered was so drenched in oil and garlic that it was almost pasta soup. But the defining death blow was the fact that my friend and I had brought a bag with two pieces of cake (i.e., that pear cake from a couple of nights ago) inside some tin foil, and we wanted to sample it. We’d already spent about $62 dollars and had a relatively decent time, but we were the last people in the place and asked the bartender if we could have a couple of forks. It was the end of the night, we’d spent our money and we just wanted a couple of bites of that Dean & Deluca cake.

The bartender asked the manager — a guy in his late 40s or early 50s, also wearing a pink shirt and black tie — and a minute later he came up behind us (we were sitting at the bar) and said he couldn’t oblige. “We have many fine desserts here,” he explained. “You should try one of them.” I saw red. I told him I would never return to his place, and that I would do what I can to dissuade others from visiting. Which is what I’m doing right now.

If it were my restaurant and it was late and a couple that had just ordered a fair amount of food and drink wanted to sample their own dessert…fine. If it was right in the middle of the dinner rush, I might politely decline. But when it’s pushing 11 and your staff is cleaning up and putting chairs on top of tables, what’s the difference?