As Fox called in the FBI to find out who had leaked the film onto the Internet, Friedman posted a column last Thursday marveling at how easy it was to find a copy of the purloined Hugh Jackman comic book film online. The column was quickly removed and over the weekend, reports emerged that he had been fired. News Corp.'s corporate P.R. even released a statement on Sunday saying that the columnist was toast.

But that was a bit premature, and Ailes gave Friedman the chance to come in and tell him and Fox News executive vice president John Moody why he shouldn't be fired. That meeting was supposed to take place this morning, but got pushed back to the afternoon.

Why go through all the bother? Our guess is that, as ridiculous as it might sound, corporate politics were to blame. Power at News Corp. is in flux now that Ruper Murdoch's deputy Peter Chernin has announced his exit. And some of the big winners in the corporate restructurings so far have been the heads of the Fox movie studio, Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopoulos. No matter how inevitable Friedman's exit may have been, it wouldn't be surprising if Ailes bristled at the idea of movie studio people making hiring-and-firing decisions in his cable news outfit.

So, Friedman got his day in kangaroo court. And lost. Here's the official statement from Fox News:

Fox News representatives and Roger Friedman met today and mutually agreed to part ways immediately. Fox News appreciates Mr. Friedman's ten years of contributions to building foxnews.com and wishes him success in his future endeavors. Mr. Friedman is grateful to his colleagues for their friendship and support over the past decade.

Update: Friedman asks that we clarify one thing: He did not not download Wolverine per se. He explains:

I did not download anything. I found Wolverine on the internet by accident on Wednesday night. I was looking for something else—info on another movie, which had a link to this site. I simply pressed "play" and when I realized it really was Wolverine, I skipped watching Lost and watched this instead. Afterwards I discovered that the Times had written about it earlier that evening. I guess what I did was called streaming. But there was no downloading. I am fervently anti-piracy, have written extensively about this, and spent too much money at amazon's mp3 site. Please let's clear up this misconception.

Okay then.

Friedman is set to meet tomorrow with Fox News chief Roger Ailes and John Moody, the news network's executive vice president for editorial, the source said. Friedman will have a chance to plead his case, but the meeting could well end with the columnist losing his job.

Friedman is in hot water for posting to FoxNews.com Thursday a review of the forthcoming movie Wolverine. The freelance columnist based his comments on an unfinished version of the movie that leaked onto the internet last week. "It's so much easier than going out in the rain!" he wrote. "I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer."

You can imagine how this went over at Wolverine producer 20th Century Fox, which last week called in the FBI to find out who leaked the film. The studio complained corporate sibling Fox News, according to Nikki Finke, and parent company News Corp. publicly condemned the review and requested its removal. Fox News promptly deleted the piece.

Finke wrote that Ailes then fired Friedman, a development seemingly confirmed by a statement News Corp. supplied to the New York Times, reading, "Fox News… terminated Mr. Friedman."

But Fox News' only statement on the affair (also given to the Times) is that "This is an internal matter that we aren't prepared to discuss at this time."

And in fact Friedman has not been fired, according to the Fox News source, although he could well be terminated during tomorrow's meeting. The delay in firing Friedman (despite News Corp.'s announcement) could be read as a play by Ailes to assert the news division's independence from film studio 20th within the News Corp. empire.

The meeting also gives Fox News time to reconcile its own definition of journalistic ethics with 20th Century Fox's. The film studio says Friedman shouldn't have broken the law in the service of a story. But Fox News seems more comfortable with such mischief. Network anchor Shep Smith wasn't fired after he was arrested for running over a competing reporter with his car so he could snag parking space, even though the incident resulted in felony battery charges (later apparently dropped without explanation).

When Bill O'Reilly's former producer accused the Fox News host of sexual harassment, producing lengthy conversation transcripts O'Reilly never denied, sibling publication the New York Post slammed her in a story headlined "'Lunatic' O'Reilly Gal Went Nuts in Bar." O'Reilly settled the suit and, of course, retains his job.

And Fox is unrepentant about stalking a liberal blogger, sending a camera crew to tail her from her apartment across state lines to Virginia.

Chatter has surfaced in recent years — specifically, since festival pickup Crash overtook Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture in 2005 — that the studios no longer wield the alacrity to bump off leaner, smaller awards hopefuls among an evolving Academy membership. It's not quite that simple, of course; Warner Bros. nabbed two wins in three years with Million Dollar Baby and The Departed, and was on the bubble this year with The Dark Knight and Gran Torino. Paramount led the nomination count and box-office tally with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Universal pushed Frost/Nixon into the Best Picture running at the expense of mini-major entries including Doubt and Revolutionary Road.

But it's not an honor just to be nominated (or simply considered) for those studios' respective bosses Alan Horn, Brad Grey and Ron Meyer. And while Fox's Tom Rothman surely appreciated Searchlight's Slumdog sweep and maybe Space Chimps' appearance in the animation montage, some consideration for his $120 million epic Australia would have been nice. However, being in the Oscar business requires a fresher approach than greenlighting today for awards season two years away. The short view is the new long view, meaning that for a handful of 2009 films, the future might be now:

· The Informant and The Human Factor: Warner's close calls last year did little to conceal the embarrassment of closing its boutique Warner Independent Pictures and selling off Slumdog Millionaire to Fox Searchlight. But at least Horn and Jeff Robinov were honest: They don't have a clue how to handle small films, and this year — with Steven Soderbergh's whistleblower intrigue The Informant and Clint Eastwood's working-titled Nelson Mandela biopic — they won't have to. The latter film in particular, reuniting Eastwood with Morgan Freeman, is prime-cut Oscar bait. Worst-case scenario, they overblow the hype (see: Changeling) and foot-soldier Soderbergh moves in. Either way, at least one studio is covered for — and invested in — the '09 derby.

· Public Enemies: Focus Features has done well by its parent Universal, finding awards love for Milk and In Bruges while exceeding box-office expectations this month with Coraline. But the studio had higher hopes for Changeling and all but conceded Picture, Actor and Director categories to Frost/Nixon's front-running competitors. They could go either way with this year's awards crop, perhaps led by Michael Mann and Johnny Depp's '30s-era crime drama Public Enemies. Test screenings are mostly positive, and the principals are perennial Oscar darlings. But the midsummer release date will either defuse its chances or, in a fairly fresh studio strategy, get out way ahead of the late-year glut — kind of like Dark Knight without the billion-dollar fluke factor.

· The Green Zone: Another Uni hopeful, reteaming Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass for a story about life inside Baghdad's occupation stronghold. Everybody knows audiences are allergic to Iraq films, but the Bourne overlap is enticing, and it doesn't need to make a fortune for the Academy to buy in. It may be an even surer thing than Public Enemies. In any case, it's cheaper — not mini-major cheaper, but definitely leaner, with more approachable talent, and perhaps that much more competitive.

· Up: Disney/Pixar will always face resistance from Academy purists, happy with the animated ghetto that contained WALL-E while bitterly maligned films like The Reader snuck into the Best Picture running. It can't last forever, though, and even if Up — another summer release with a potentially long shadow — can't amass its predecessor's plaudits, it'll bend the resistance a few degrees closer to breaking. Expect Pixar to follow its own WALL-E lead, launching this year's first "For Your Consideration" salvo by mid-fall.

· Avatar: December will welcome James Cameron's first film in 12 years, during which time the filmmaker designed Avatar's 3-D motion-capture technique essentially from scratch. It's got at least a visual effects Oscar in the trophy case, but why stop there? If The Dark Knight can cut an awards-season trail, what's a $40 million campaign on top of the couple hundred million onscreen? That is, unless it's abrogated its awards legend to Searchlight, getting out of the Australia business in favor of the Marley and Me trade. It wouldn't be the worst strategy. And if we haven't gotten over it already, we will.

The AP reports today that lawyers for each side asked Judge Gary Feess to delay a hearing scheduled for today, citing "productive" discussions expected to extend through the weekend. No additional details were released by either studio, but we've already started our informal Defamer HQ Settlement Pool. We'll call it for an announcement Sunday at 5, just before the Golden Globe news dump avalanche. Who's in?

• Attorneys: 'Watchmen' settlement talks productive [AP]

Not that Lloyd Levin's argument isn't persuasive and sincere enough to warrant some consideration: Fox, which insists it never relinquished the rights to the graphic-novel adaptation and has filed for an injunction to stop its release, reputedly turned its back on Watchmen in 2005 when Levin and original rightsholder Lawrence Gordon took a detailed pitch to both that studio and Warners. "It included," Levin writes, "a cover letter describing the project and its history, budget information, a screenplay, the graphic novel, and it made mention that a top director was involved."

At which point, Levin adds, Fox gave a "flat 'pass.' That's it. An internal Fox email documents that executives there felt the script was one of the most unintelligible pieces of shit they had read in years." But Warners, despite its own problems with the script, decided to take a gamble on Zack Snyder, the R-rating, the budget, the running time, the DVD extras and every other hard-sell, years-in-the-making quality that was soon lobbed into production at the kinder, gentler studio.

If you're still waiting for the part where Levin asserts his and Warners' legal claim to Watchmen's distribution rights, it's OK — so are we. But in closing, straight from the Judge Judy School of Emotional Public Appeals, there is this:

By his own admission, Judge [Gary] Feess is faced with an extremely complex legal case, with a contradictory contractual history, making it difficult to ascertain what is legally right. Are there circumstances here that are more meaningful, which shed light on what is ultimately just, to be taken into account when assessing who is right? In this case, what is morally right, beyond the minutiae of decades-old contractual semantics, seems clear cut.

For the sake of the artists involved, for the hundreds of people, executives and filmmakers, actors and crew, who invested their time, their money, and dedicated a good portion of their lives in order to bring this extraordinary project to life, the question of what is right is clear and unambiguous - Fox should stand down with its claim.

Oh. Again, we're no lawyers, but our first impression is usually correct. So let's just say that for the sake of a judicial system already choked with inefficiency and predation, the answer of what is right seems even clearer by implication — Warner Bros. should probably bring its checkbook when a federal judge hears the case Jan. 20.

• Exclusive: An Open Letter From 'Watchmen' Producers [Source via HE]

20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. remain at odds over who owns the rights to Zack Snyder's blockbuster graphic-novel adaptation, but a few morsels of news have crept up to suggest that Warner's fear of an injunction (not to mention its testiness over the lack of a trial) may actually be unwarranted:

Despite the judge having apparently become convinced over the past week that producer Lawrence Gordon failed to do everything required of him to get the Watchmen film rights back from Fox in turnaround, an injunction certainly isn't a given here. Under copyright law, a rightsholder still has to show, among other things, that it will be "irreparably harmed" absent an injunction, and it's hard to see how Fox, which basically sat on its rights as the Watchmen project bounced from studio to studio, can't wait until a trial to get whatever money it's entitled to from any infringement.

David Poland, meanwhile, calls the "Fox sat on its rights" argument "utter bullshit," while giving similarly little quarter to the geek crowd accusing the studio of torching its long-nurtured Watchmen dream; "[W]izened old money-grabbing bastard murdoch and his retarded offspring," comes just one of the cries from their trail of tears. "Considering his position and influence, truly one of the few people in history the world would be a better place without." Hell, write a script — Warner will need a lucrative new franchise by the time this is over.

• Will Warners settle or fight to the cartoonishly-stylized death? [THR ESQ]

• Judge Delays Ruling on Blocking Release of ‘Watchmen’ Film [NYT]

The latest reports suggest that neither studio is keen to settle over Fox's claim to the film, which was affirmed last week in a decision handed down by a judge in Los Angeles. A Warners attorney tells the AP this afternoon that its release plans stand despite Fox's continuing quest for an injunction, adding that "a trial is necessary and a settlement unlikely."

No rush, though: That trial would take place starting Jan. 20, only 45 days before Watchmen's scheduled March 6 opening. (Paramount is handling the international release starting March 4.) We hope this isn't the same attorney whose due diligence — or lack thereof — was what drove the Christmas Eve judgment in the first place, but in any case, his posturing skills are first-rate.

• Fox says it will try to stop 'Watchmen' [AP]

1. Jennifer Aniston is done with your questions about Brad Pitt. (For now.) Outperforming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by more than $12 million — and setting a Christmas-release record in the process — confirms Aniston's box-office ownage over her ex-husband and should establish some self-sustained breathing room going forward. Until Pitt and Angelina Jolie both earn Oscar nominations next month, naturally, and the cycle begins anew. Enjoy it while you can, Jen.

2. Owen Wilson may never have to promote a film again. Already softball-averse in his first interviews since attempting suicide in 2007, Wilson can simply follow the Marley Model of letting his co-stars do the heavy-lifting / disrobing / cute-puppy thing while he retires to reclusive leading-mandom.

3. David Frankel is for real. The son of a former executive editor of the NYT, director Frankel has done nothing but make money for Fox since his feature debut The Devil Wears Prada. His formula: Adapt sources efficiently, cast intelligently, and let the principals do the rest — even the kids and dogs. It's a lot harder than it looks. Next up: The baseball procedural Moneyball, adapted from another best-seller and rumored to feature Pitt in the lead.

4. Fox is the hottest studio in town. After a year-long string of embarrassing flops and underachievers — including the recent, devastating one-two punch of Australia and Day the Earth Stood Still — the studio heads into 2009 with a likely repeater at #1 and a Watchmen judgment that could net it upwards of $50 million next spring. Without doing anything. If luck is the residue of design, then Fox's engineers are entitled to a raise.

5. The dog dies. Who knew? Oh.

• 'Marley' leads holiday box office pack [Variety]

Judge Gary Feess's decision arrived late on Christmas Eve, announcing a more detailed judgment would follow "soon," according to the New York Times. Doubtless it made for an even more joyous holiday at Fox, where news of its record-breaking Marley & Me opening was compounded by the potential to pull in between $35-$40 million next March on a film it turned around years ago and didn't spend a dime to produce or market.

Warners, meanwhile, wasn't talking after the decision, which stated specifically that "Fox owns a copyright interest consisting of, at the very least, the right to distribute the Watchmen motion picture." Fox won't, of course; nor will Warner Bros. challenge their rivals' claim in a trial set for late January — six weeks ahead of Watchmen's opening, and thus squarely in the middle of marketing and press rounds.

As we presumed back in August when the squabble loudly spilled into court — with Fox claiming producer Larry Gordon didn't buy the graphic novel's rights before taking it door-to-door for the next two decades — a settlement is the likeliest outcome for all involved. It won't be cheap for Warners, which already has a split with Paramount (Watchmen's international distributor) and co-producer Legendary Pictures and could actually lose money on a fanboy sensation expected to earn more than $350 million worldwide. Nor will it be especially pretty for Fox, whose smartest decision of the last two years on the film side was the one to stay quiet while Warners' lawyers signed off on the studio producing Fox's film. Low class, but well-played. (EW notes today that Fox's lawyers did reach out, which we don't believe and would virtually guarantee a trial if Warners actively and knowingly defied them.)

Speaking of well-played (sort-of), does anyone still have any questions as to why WB moved Harry Potter to May '09? And Christopher Nolan, if you're reading this, WB bosses Jeff Robinov and Alan Horn need to talk to you about fast-tracking the next Batman film. Feel free to call either at home. Like, now.

• Judge Says Fox Owns Rights to a Warner Movie [NYT]

So come the whispers from inside, including this today to Jeffrey Wells: "Agents all say they're the studio of last resort, they don't pay money, and Rupert Murdoch has said they're all on a lifeboat and there are going to be radical changes there. He's unhappy, and when he gets this way he fires people. [Chernin's contract] "has been up for weeks and he still hasn't renewed it. I think he and Tom Rothman might leave." Brutal! Now Rothman will never get his Emmy. [Hollywood Elswehere]

We looked into it, and apparently "Alec Greven" is someone who actually exists — a Colorado elementary-school student who first sold the self-help guide to his classmates as a $3 pamphlet. HarperCollins picked it up for release as a 46-page hardcover late last month, after which time corporate cousin Fox confirmed it had acquired the option for a film we're sure Greven is attached to adapt, direct, and probably star in as himself.

What could go wrong? Or at least any more wrong than Meet Dave? After alll, Greven is a little too young and sincere to hate on in a Neil Strauss-ian monster-cad kind of way, and even critics who say Girls amounts to little more than a "gag gift" acknowledge we could all learn from the child's seductive stylings — such as:

On relationships: "Sometimes, you get a girl to like you, then she ditches you. Life is hard, move on! Or sometimes it just doesn't work out. I had a crush on a girl in preschool. Then my family had to move, so I had to let her wash out of my mind."

On having a crush: "Many boys get crushes on girls. But it can be very hard to get a girl to like you. Sometimes it takes years! Whatever happens, just don't act desperate. [...] Wait until middle school to try to get her to love you. Otherwise, you have to hold on to her for a long time and that would be very hard. Tip: Most boys in elementary school can hold on to a girl for only 30 days."

We smell franchise! And wait until all those Reader critics gets a hold of this one.

• Fox learns 'How to Talk to Girls' [Variety]

• 'How to Talk to Girls' [Time]

The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that "disastrous reviews from test screenings" rejected Australia's original ending, in which Jackman's character dies:

One test-screening audience member described the film as "an action-filled tragedy'' and urged Luhrmann to change the ending.

"If they can tastefully tie this movie up into a solid story, with a nice pace - Baz will have a winner here,'' one reviewer wrote.

"And there is no reason to kill off Wolvie (Jackman) in this one - come on.''

Desperate for a hit and apparently not remembering the conclusion (or success) of their previous tragedy Titanic, execs at 20th Century Fox spent much of the week persuading Luhrmann to rewire a "more uplifting" ending. Thus the Telegraph's blunt headline, "Baz bows to Hollywood," a mournful reminder that a nation's pride, history and artistic ambitions are no match for the monolithic will of the men who brought you Meet Dave, Space Chimps and The Rocker.

As far as next week's deadline, the visionary Luhrmann remained coy: "I wouldn't say we are within schedule, but it's possibly within reach," he told the paper. At least he's retained creative control over uniquely unconvincing optimism. Look for Fox to have massaged that by the end of the day as well.

• Baz bows to Hollywood [Sunday Telegraph via The Guardian]

The 41-year-old Aussie, who gave birth to daughter Sunday Rose in July, said she and six other women [...] became pregnant.

"I never thought that I would get pregnant and give birth to a child, but it happened on this movie," Kidman told The Australian Women's Weekly in an exclusive interview for the magazine's 75th anniversary edition, released Wednesday.

"Seven babies were conceived out of this film and only one was a boy. There is something up there in the Kununurra water because we all went swimming in the waterfalls, so we can call it the fertility waters now."

So begins the long pilgrimage for thousands of baby-ready couples around the world, not to mention the whirring marketing machine at Fox, which this morning called an emergency meeting to plot the November launch ofits Australia tie-in Kununurra Baby2o™: "When Urban sperm aren't enough, head for the Outback." Let's all hope this savvy souvenir performs as well for everybody as Nic's Stolen Placenta Bites™ scored for Moulin Rouge.

• Nicole Kidman credits fertile water with pregnancy [AP]

Fox remains confident in its charge that producer Larry Gordon did not fully pay to reclaim the studio's Watchmen rights before shopping them to Universal, Paramount and, finally, Warner Bros., which greenlit the project with Zack Snyder after the success of the director's 300. And while we are no lawyers, having been disbarred months ago for our special brand of vigilante justice, shouldn't this be an open-and-shut case? If the terms are in writing and Warners' only apparent defense is that Fox sat by and waited until the film was finished shooting before raising objections, we sense the judge will have even more specific ideas of how restitution might be achieved. And it will feature numbers with many zeroes left of the decimal point. That Harry Potter bump looks more purposeful every day.

• 'Watchmen' to get its day in court [EW]

Things quickly deteriorated from there, alas, but Kassovitz's loss is our gain today as he disowns Babylon A.D. in the most spectacular, career-immolating fashion imaginable:

"It's pure violence and stupidity," he admits. "The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet. All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters... instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24."

The last stroke, Kassovitz says, was when Fox interfered with the editing of the film, paring it down to a confusing 93 minutes (original reports were that 70 minutes were cut from the film; Kassovitz says the number is closer to 15). ...

""I don't see how people who went through all these amazing blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Iron Man this summer will take it. ... I should have chosen a studio that has guts," he says. "Fox was just trying to get a PG-13 movie. I'm ready to go to war against them, but I can't because they don't give a s—t."

Fox was not available for comment, according to the author, but we don't mind defending the studio on the basis of its clear interest in rich "points of view" belonging to everyone from Manoj Night Shyamalan to Eddie Murphy to Space Chimps — this year alone, in fact, as evidenced by its glamorous run of greeting cards memorializing those perspectives and experiences. Furthermore, if you can't get a metaphysical hard-on watching Jack Bauer clamp jumper cables to terrorist nipples, then maybe it's your point of view that requires more worldly considerations, Matty. We're almost loath to say it, but seriously: Team Fox.

• 'Babylon A.D.' Director Mathieu Kassovitz Describes a Disastrous Production[SciFi Scanner]

To be fair, the film goes wider later this week, and Focus always has the UK release this fall and whatever slight cult audience accrues for video. So it could be worse — now imagine you're Rainn Wilson.

As we anticipated last Friday, TV viewers' Wilson goodwill isn't exactly multiplex-ready. The Rocker's marketing misfires, non-existent word-of-mouth and release-date follies yielded a $2.8 million, 12th-place opening. We're not in the short-sighted camp that thinks Fox is having the Summer From Hell — not with The Happening and What Happens in Vegas finding very respectable profits overseas — but there really is no positive way to spin this one, at least not for his toplining future. Until further notice, Wilson is Dwight Schrute and the clever bit-parter who has a way with pregnancy-test pitches and other Oscar-winning patois — maybe not in that order, but at least in that zone. Maybe a few scenes in Inglorious Bastards? Our Mondays are too fragile as it is to go through this again.

• Weeken Box Office Results [Box Office Mojo]

“Of course we are concerned about the fans; however, any disappointment from the core fans should not be directed toward Fox. What we are doing is seeking to enforce our distribution rights to Watchmen. Legal copyright ownership should not just be swept under the rug and ignored.”

We can appreciate this to a point, of course, but really: What can one's chances be against an opponent who'll sacrifice anything — starting with grammar ("I wont make any difference to [Rupert Murdoch's] bank balance because there are plenty of uninformed sheep out there for his rabidly, right wing, keeping the populous afraid of their neighbours so they'll vote that way, brainwashing agenda, for him to fleece of their hard earned, tax paying cash") — to make his moral stand? Watchmen seems the least of your problems, guys; watch out for those lethal, legendary dangling participles on the way to your cars tonight.

• The 'Watchmen' war: Fanboys furious with Fox [EW]