Studios Marketers Are Defenseless Against Twitter, They Squeal
Shame on you! Movies are bombing all over and it’s your fault. The latest creation in the Ass-Covering Studio Excuses R&D Dept. is the “Twitter Effect.” Movies aren’t making money, you see, because too many people are learning, 140 characters at a time, about how bad they are.
Every new messaging has brought studio complaints about how they’re being killed with “word of mouth.” Before Twitter, it was text messaging, Facebook, MySpace, “the web,” email and, for all we know, AOL, television, FM radio, the telegraph and the passenger pigeon, which prevented hucksters from getting people to hand over money for what they think will be a good show, but really isn’t.
So, here’s the latest incarnation: Did you tweet about your disappointment in a movie, like Bruno? Did all your friends tweet back in agreement?
According to social media specialists, Universal is mad at you for driving away 73% percent of Bruno’s ticket sales! When movie-goers take to their micro-blogging sites and hurl instant critiques at helpless studios, all their marketing machinery is rendered impotent. Some of this summer’s alleged victims have included Bruno, Land of the Lost, and Year One.
After mega advertising campaigns, months of free publicity from hungry media outlets (and web sites looking for cheap content!), specialists hired to create Facebook fan pages and Twitter feeds, people insist on slagging summer movies on Twitter. Like, all Sascha and Universal wanted to do was expose the ugliness that lives in your heart through various stunts involving dildos and terrorists. Then you had to go off and mean about it. What’s a matter with you?!
So how have the studios tried to harness the awe-striking a wrathful power of Twitter? Here’s an example:
With Year One, Sony at first tried to get in on the action and created a promotional Year One twitter account that would cull all the posts tagged with “#yearone. Sad for Sony, though, most of those tags were attached to disparaging statements. So they tried to pivot and create their own Year One twitter meme!
But no amount of tweet co-opting could save the floundering flick (full disclosure, I have a soft spot for Biblical comedies that have fantastic Oliver Platt cameos, so I dug it — you’re welcome, Sony!) But let’s be honest here, Studios. Just between you and me, nobody else is listening right now: you really didn’t expect that many people to go continue to see a shitty movie after it opened, right? You must have known that eventually people would talk. They’d tell other people how little they liked Will Ferrell screaming at the sky. Again. And though the time between seeing said shitty movie and then telling your buddies about how shitty the movie maybe has shortened thanks to twitter, you must have known from the beginning that you were pushing a shitty product.
So really there’s only one way to combat the Twitter effect: Stop making shitty movies.
P.S. I really laughed during Land of the Lost! Sorry no one else did, Universal!
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
It is called word of mouth. maybe now that twitter makes that happen fast enough to impact the opening weekend, Hollywood will have to rely less on marketing and more on quality to get that first three days.
@Natasha VC: The bees! The bees!
I had no idea there even was a movie called Year One until I read this post. Social media FTW!
I feel sorry for the people who have to sit there videotaping the awful movies I don't feel like paying to see.
goetz
451 Followers. What's that I feel? Ennui? The bleakness of absurdity?
then maybe Universal should stop making craptacular movies. nothing wrong with them being called out by the viewing public.
labyrinthine IS DOING THIS
@SpyMagician:
Truth! How will
hipsters know which bad movies to watch on purpose!
And how will we be able to tell good Nicolas Cage movies apart from Great Nicolas Cage movie?
...because too many people are learning, 140 characters at a time, how bad they are..
Good. Maybe these sucktastic marketing departments that have been running Ho'wood for the last 4 decades will die a quick death and we can get back to making worthwhile cinema.
I wouldn't rely on a Twittered opinion of a movie anymore than I would go onto a website where people rate products. With or without the internet, you can figure out if a movie is worth seeing. More often than not, just by watching the trailer.
A purpose to twitter that directly affects my daily life. Thank you, twitterers, for stopping me from subjecting myself to yet another craptastic movie.
Solution: Make better movies.
Look folks if people don’t pay good money for bad movies, then Hollywood will then have to stop making bad movies and then what will all you ironic hipsters have to mock? NOTHING!
Because it will all be nice and good and worth $11.75 a pop and worth your time and irony will be dead. THE END!
Silly studios, what about the fact that sometimes a sucky movie is a sucky movie?
"because too many people are learning, 140 characters at a time, how bad they are."
Absolutely brilliant fact.
@The Curse of Millhaven: One could hope that they'd make better movies, but you could also say that the three examples were poorly marketed.
Bruno clearly wasn't going to play in the hinterlands; Year One had the kid from AD playing his stock character and Jack Black being Jack Black, the movie just screamed "wait for cable" and the PG-13, Will Ferrel thing was never conceptually explained, plus it was marketed with a urine joke.
@Natasha VC: I'm confused. How is every Nicolas Cage movie not great?
@Royalpeach:
Easier said than done. It would mean that the studios would have to put some creative people in execubot positions, not MBAs. The horror. The horror.
Funny how the assumption is that the movie sucks. If the movie was any good, that good news would travel just as quickly.
But yeah, the odds are not in the studios' favor. And yeah, the studios know that.
Twitterers who point out shit, helping me avoid it, are not enemies. Studios who dumped that shit in the middle of my sidewalk and want me to think it's not shit are.
dragonhorse
Don't mess with the studio marketing departments, or they'll take away your Thursday night television!
daveyjonesisdead