Tom Rothman’s ‘Wolverine’ Lie Fib: Corporate Miscommunication? Or Studio Heads Up Asses?

He’s been tracking 20th Century Fox’s Tom Rothman who was basically caught in a lie. Rothman said, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the final version would be a significantly different cut from the unfinished leaked workprint.

It’s not. And amid bland statements from the studio at least Goldstein is trying to reveal the true story. Sorry, if we roll our eyes with skepticism, but of course Fox and Rothman are going to come up with some damage-control excuse, no?

Now the studio is saying, “hey, it was all a mix-up, Rothman didn’t know!”

“There was no ‘fibbing’ involved, “Fox’s senior vice president of corporate communications, Chris Petrikin said. “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. 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.”

Vulture essentially provides this translation: We not only lost a DVD workprint, we have no clue what we’re doing! Yes, it’s only a 10 minute difference and not that big a deal, but dunno, fact of the matter remains that Fox has a bad track record. We don’t especially care and the geek bloggers are excessive in their hatred for Fox — mostly because they tend to fuck up films that nerds love (“Daredevil,” “Live Free or Die Hard,” etc.) — but still, color us skeptical. Others will probably have a field day with this rebuttal. [LAT]