“Bruno”: Blaming It All on Twitter

Ben Fritz at the LA Times blog does have a few ideas on why word-of-mouth for the film could affect the film adversely:  “The reason is simple: Many people just didn’t like ‘Brüno.’ The film’s Cinema Score—an average grade given by a sample of those who see the picture—was C, very low given what easy graders moviegoers generally are. It’s impossible to know for sure what audiences disliked, but the envelope-pushing amount of male nudity no doubt played a major role.”  Sure, word-of-mouth is important.  And sure, a comment or multiple comments on Twitter may be the reason one person does or does not see a particular film.  But the question at the heart of these stories is why do people decide to see or skip a film?  The LA Times brings up the confounding variable of male nudity and simultaneously supports the idea that people didn’t particularly like the film in a poll by a market research firm.

In Daily Finance, Alex Salkever writes about pilfering through tweets brought up on TweetFeel to subjectively evaluate the “Brüno” tweets.  He comments, “in the final tally, there seem to be an equal number of positive and negative comments. And many people expressed sentiment that ‘Brüno’ was a movie they had to watch—a ‘must-see’ event that would leave them out of cocktail party conversations for at least the next week or so. In a nutshell, Twitter probably didn’t kill Brüno. But Twitter certainly made him a little less appealing by broadcasting the true level of discomfort caused by the risque comedy of the film.”  Brad Brevet on movie blog Ropes of Silicon holds a similar opinion, “To pose this [Time] theory is to place a large amount of confidence in Twitter and the tendencies of its users. To assume such up-and-down box-office results could be attributed to Twitter is to suggest a serious game-changer. Personally, I scoff at the idea.”

This week the UK is abuzz with a treatise from a fifteen year old intern at Morgan Stanley called “How Teenagers Consume Media.”  And in it, Matthew Robson says flatly, “teenagers do not use twitter [sic]. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it…In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.”  This he says right after talking about the rampant popularity of Facebook.  While Robson’s essay is without empirical evidence, his conclusions remind us that there is a lot going on out there that affects what we want to see and sure tweets (or Facebook status updates for that matter) may affect whether or not we feel the need to see a particular film, there’s a lot changing out there.  There’s no telling how many people skipped “Brüno” after getting a negative review from a relative at a family picnic or were just too uncomfortable with the whole “gay” thing.  Twitter might be an answer but it is not THE answer.

Loading ...

Is Twitter a game changer at the box office?

	Yes, one tweet is worth one hundred chats by the water cooler.
	No, any mechanism will obviously have some influence, but it's still the tried and true word of mouth.
	This whole Twitter bandwagon is really overblown.

Read & React: “Bruno”: Blaming It All on Twitter