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.

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?