THE BIG PICTURE

No one said opening a costly summer movie was easy. But 20th Century Fox has endured one mini-crisis after another in the weeks leading up to Friday’s release of its much-anticipated “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Earlier this week, the studio was forced to cancel the Mexican premiere after the country closed most of its movie theaters in its scramble to contain the growing swine flu epidemic. With the nation’s theaters largely shuttered, the studio has been forced to delay the Mexican release of the film.

The movie has already endured a series of other PR nightmares, beginning with the news earlier this month that someone had stolen a pirated workprint of the much-ballyhooed summer blockbuster and put it up on the Internet. The studio managed to weather another embarrassment when Fox News.com columnist Roger Friedman not only reviewed the pirated movie but boasted about how easy it was to download off the Web, prompting a nasty in-house tussle that resulted in Friedman’s firing.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the studio got more egg on its face last week when reviewers and bloggers returned from the first early screenings of the finished film, voicing skepticism about the studio’s initial account of the supposed differences between the pirated copy and the genuine article.

Even though Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman told Entertainment Weekly shortly after the film leaked that the pirated copy was substantially different from the actual movie, including being “about 10 minutes shorter,” people who’ve now seen the finished film are saying it is -- gulp -- exactly the same length as the pirated copy.

As Aint It Cool News reported: “Having seen the finished film, the mystery is solved: The workprint version IS in fact identical to the release print, sans effects and some audio work. It’s obvious that Fox is trying their darndest to keep this news from getting out, because it will eliminate most of the motivation for people who have seen the workprint to pay for a ticket.”

Bloggers may not get their own facts right much of the time, but boy are they hard on studios who dissemble to protect their big summer movies. Hilary Lewis at businessinsider.com calls the news about the movie’s virtually identical running time a fresh scandal, saying, “Fox is in trouble. Now not only are all of the bad reviews of the workprint version justified, but the studio’s been caught in a lie -- which weakens the trust audiences have in the studio and might lead to more people watching the pirated versions of Fox’s films, including ‘Wolverine.’ ”

I’m not sure the situation is really that dire. The bad buzz from the Internet could put a crimp in the film’s opening weekend, but history has shown that most fans, especially devotees of visual-effects films, want to see the movie on the big screen.

Still, I can’t say Fox has done a great job of combating this latest onslaught of bad news. When I first asked the studio to explain the issue of how Rothman could say 10 minutes of footage were missing -- even though the running times for the pirated and theatrical versions were the same -- I got a bland non-denial. The studio simply said that the pirated workprint was “substantially different than the release version . . . and is not remotely representative of the experience that moviegoers will have when the film is finally released theatrically.”

On Tuesday, the studio was finally more forthcoming. Fox’s senior vice president of corporate communications, Chris Petrikin, who was out of the country on vacation -- in Mexico, of all places -- when bloggers started bashing Rothman last week, explains that he was probably the person who told Rothman that 10 minutes were missing from the pirated version of the film. He stressed that the studio was under enormous pressure after the piracy as it attempted to sort through a host of often wildly speculative Internet reports about the theft.

“There was no ‘fibbing’ involved -- that would imply that we were so on top of things that we anticipated having one of our biggest films of the year stolen and had time to concoct a plan to purposefully ‘spin’ wrong information,” Petrikin told me.

“Remember, Tom gave this [Entertainment Weekly] interview a day after we learned of the theft. A lot of information and misinformation was flying back and forth then, and there was no way to sort it out quickly or definitively. In fact, I think I told Tom that there might be 10 minutes missing from the stolen version, based -- obviously -- on misinformation I was given or misinterpreted. The real issue is the scale of this crime and that the film was not finished when it was stolen.”

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patrick.goldstein @latimes.com