It’s an image we’re seeing everywhere, a black and white sumi ink illustration of X-Men’s Wolverine with his arms crossed and claws beared.
It’s a great teaser poster for the next Wolverine movie, which is coming this summer, and it’s such a popular image that fans have been ripping it off from bus stops everywhere.
Thankfully the billboards are too big to tear off and steal, but Collider reports that Fox will have to replace 50% of the bus stop posters, which have been stolen by fans. This also means that fans have been breaking the glass to steal these posters, which isn’t cool, but it’s also is a good sign to the studio that there is anticipation for the film, larceny aside.
This is not the first time genre posters have been stolen from bus stops. In fact, last year the Huffington Post reported a story about a man going on trial for stealing more than 3,000 posters and reselling them, with their collected value put at $450,000. Ten years ago, USA Today also reported that X2 posters were being ripped off from bus stops in fifteen cities, and a Fox executive told the paper, “We’re thrilled that fans are that excited about the movie. But those one-sheets aren’t cheap.”
Doing a net search on this, we also learned from imdb that twenty years ago Warner Brothers had to replace the Catwoman posters for Batman Returns, because they were being repeatedly stolen from bus stops. There is apparently a way to open up the glass on a bus stop to take a poster, and we wouldn’t tell you how to do that even if we knew, but a lot of people just smash the glass and take them. If you’ve had to swerve in the road to avoid broken glass in the streets like I have because of this, it would be nice if the thieves would clean up after themselves. It’s also not hard to buy one of these posters online, and they’re not that expensive, so please don’t be a putz and pay for one.
As far as the movie, which was directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line), the official plot line from 20th Century Fox tells us that The Wolverine “takes the most iconic character of the X-Men universe to modern-day Japan. Out of his depth in an unknown world, he will face a host of unexpected and deadly opponents in a life-or-death battle that will leave him forever changed. Vulnerable for the first time and pushed to his physical and emotional limits, he confronts not only lethal samurai steel but also his inner struggle against his own immortality.”
Look for The Wolverine on July 26, and X-Men Days of Future Past, which we’ll see next year on July 18, 2014.
