Now I've suspected that studios use the Internet for their own purposes and leak information from pretend scoopers before, I mean they would be mad not to use this simple and free marketing stream wouldn't they? Well we might just be seeing this with Cloverfield.

A big name online and offline magazine has just posted shots of the bootlegged Cloverfield trailer and they've credited Paramount with the stills. Now these are stills from the trailer that was filmed using a camera-phone, not the actual trailer.

I wrote about the bootlegged trailer that I caught online just yesterday. I was the first online film site to discover it and so when I saw the stories appearing elsewhere I was interested to see who they were quoting as sources.

Clicking on the Hollywood Elsewhere story I found the link through to NYMag.com where they have the stills, and get this, beneath each of the stills they have the line “Courtesty of Paramount”.

Now of course they could be putting these lines up just to calm the Paramount lawyers should they attempt to retaliate for the posting, but it does seem funny to me to add this line to illegally copied footage.

Could it be that Paramount have been clever enough to see the potential of releasing an early fake bootlegged trailer onto the Interflab and raise hype? Well I don't think that's a stretch to imagine that studios are manipulating the online sites in this way, after all the hype online can genuinely help to make or break a film.

Regardless of whether this has happened in the case of the Cloverfield trailer, you can imagine that studios are doing this already, and if not then they really should be. It's a great revenue stream, and simply getting a member of staff to leak something out to the Interflab is pretty easy, especially if that leak doesn't spoil anything for the film but provides a first look or a reveal for the audience.