I am SO tired of those motherfucking snakes…
“The Internet buzz over “Snakes on a Plane” turned out to be nothing to hiss about. The high-flying thriller preceded by months of unprecedented Web buildup technically debuted as the No. 1 movie, but with a modest $15.25 million opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. Distributor New Line Cinema included $1.4 million that “Snakes on a Plane” raked in during 10 p.m. screenings Thursday to get a head start on the weekend. Without those revenues, the movie’s weekend total would be $13.85 million, putting it just behind “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” which took in $14.1 million in its third weekend. […] New Line’s Tuckerman said “Snakes on a Plane” would turn in a solid profit but that he did not know why the movie failed to live up to its Internet hype. ‘I think people were more excited about the marketing than the actual movie,’ said Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations. ‘New Line did not set out to create this Internet buzz. That’s actually a marketer’s dream, but when marketing translates into awareness but does not inspire people to get out from behind their computers and into the theater, that’s a problem.’” (CNN)
Another case of “Web Blew Point Oh?” This guy seems to think so, and the numbers back him up.
Email Article Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 09:27pm Mack Simpson
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Technorati Tags: Advertising, Snakes On A Plane, box office
2 Comments Add your own
1. makethelogobigger | August 20th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Ok, I’m gonna say…
1) Opening weekend less than even Redeye, considering no blog promotion on the order of snakes, but…
2) It might not have had faired as well without the blog. Maybe we all expected a $40 mill weekend when what we really got was what we should’ve aimed for in the first place – a decent opening.
3) Can Snakes stay at $15 mill a weekend for a month. Don’t know many studios that would balk at $60 mill gross whether it was in one weekend or over four.
4) Maybe it should’ve been promoted like a horror movie, not some camp Scary Movie 12, and it might have come out stronger? At least with Scary Movie, there’s no identity crisis – you knew what it was all along. Here, it was like people expected Pulp Fiction meets Congo:
“Jules, if you give this snake $1,500, I’m gonna shoot ‘em on general principle.”
5) Why only Snakes on a blog promotional efforts? Was this an experiment by the marketing dept at the studio? The paranoid guy in my head says yes. If only for the fact that the blog got 1,000’s of hits within days. How do you get that kinda traffic off of an email to a few friends unless you’re handing out twenties or you have PR people pushing it for you?
2. jamesh-h | August 21st, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Some of it comes down to the Email content audience vs. I’ll-pay-for-it content audience.
Everyone thinks a 30-second phone call from SLJ is funny. The older and more conservative, the better the chances this’ll amuse you. My Dad was rolling. It’s funny.
But require people to ask for “two tickets to Snakes on a Plane, please” and you’re talking to a wholly different demographic. And I don’t just mean that in a snarky, sarcastic way. Not entirely, anyway.
I’m shocked the movie did as well as it did. And then I’m not. Hype or no, the American Movie-Going Audience voted with their hard earned dough. Good for them. I hope they’ll buy a slew of my t-shirts on CafePress, too.
The interesting thing here - and you touched on it with your YouTube post - is that we are really getting a taste of the unfocusable power of consumer-generated hype/ver/torial. And putting all this power in the consumer/constituent’s hands makes for wildly unpredictable results. Which kicks ass if you look at marketing and campaigning like Vegas: maybe you’ll win; maybe you’ll lose; maybe you’re going to get to white knuckle through some amazing shit and sweat a little. However, take the average marketer’s temperature, and you find out: they don’t want Vegas. They want Provo, UT. And surely the “Snakes…” producers would have liked this movie to outsell Titanic.
How to make “Snakes…” a movie that reconciles the email audience with the movie goers? Make a movie worth seeing.
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