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Do leaks matter?: This weekend's release of Wolverine provides at least one data point.

This weekend's box office was worth watching for a few reasons.

First, it's the first official weekend of the summer movie season, with X-Men Origins: Wolverine acting as the first big summer release. Second, that very same film suffered a highly publicized leak of an unfinished work print that many feared could spell disaster. Third, it's been a big spring for movies, with box office up substantially over last year, and this might be our first opportunity to see whether that's going to carry over to summer. If all that weren't enough, you might even wonder whether fear of the flu could keep people at home.

So what happened? Wolverine made $87 million, and made it in spite of some truly dismal reviews: a Metacritic score of 44 and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 37.

As HitFix notes here, the movie's opening isn't in line with the bow of Iron Man last year at nearly $100 million, but it's a perfectly respectable superhero kick-off nonetheless.

It's hard to know what the effects of the leaked print were without visiting the hypothetical universe in which it doesn't take place, but when you consider that Watchmen, which was even more relentlessly hyped than Wolverine, made a little less than $56 million in its opening weekend, it's hard to feel persuaded that the unauthorized copy that made its way onto the Internet was particularly devastating.

What happened elsewhere? The only other big release of the weekend was Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, which made an estimated $15.3 million, which isn't dreadful but did represent, as Box Office Mojo notes, "the least-attended start of all Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies." Ouch.