Who says old school media companies still just don’t get it? I do.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch had arranged to rent out a theater in San Francisco tomorrow night to show Marvel’s new film Iron Man to 600 of his readers. He paid for every seat in the theater and then put up a post directing readers how to sign up (paying $1 to make sure people would actually legitimately want them). It went smoothly, me and several people I know were supposed to go.

A few hours later, TechCrunch gets a cease & desist letter from Marvel stating the showing was unauthorized — even though Arrington had called the group sales lines on the website to set the whole thing up. He was told to take down the post immediately and contact the lawyer who sent the very terse letter.

Now, I don’t know all the legal angles at play here, but I assume Arrington does, he is a lawyer after all. But just from a pure PR perspective, this has to be one of the dumbest moves in recent memory on the Internet for a mega movie’s opening weekend. They were basically getting 600 fanboys to come see their movie, and thousands more buzzing about the event if they couldn’t make it. These folks, myself included, probably would have provided plenty of free PR whether it be via blog post, IM, Twitter, etc.

So now I’m thinking either a) the movie sucks or b) Marvel is very stupid or c) both.

I had been very excited for Iron Man too.

Bitchmeme on.

UPDATE 4/30: The show will go on! Marvel blames Oracle who apparently has an event at the theater at the same time and thought the TechCrunch readers (The Sharks) would break into a melee with the Oracle invitees (The Jets). Sure.

I’d like to think that being near the top of Techmeme most of the night as well as consistent coverage on Twitter and FriendFeed helped the cause. That, or Arrington’s $2,000 in legal fees…