'Sharknado' Gets a Second Chance

Although it was a Twitter sensation a week ago, Syfy's "Sharknado" failed to achieve sensational ratings with its debut showing, attracting just 1.4 million viewers. News of the schlocky film's explosive social-media performance last Thursday night—600,000 tweets about the movie in seven hours—was all over the headlines the morning following its premier, but once the ratings numbers came in, it was clear that even if some people were talking a lot about "Sharknado," only an average number of people were watching it.  An encore broadcast of the film tonight, July 18, will attempt to generate more impressive numbers.

"Sharknado"'s initial ratings were on a par with those of other original films on Syfy and substantially lower than the channel's most successful original programming. "Sharknado" drew almost a million fewer viewers than the season finale of "Defiance" pulled in, and more than a million fewer than "Sharktopus," another campy Syfy original, got when it aired in 2010.

It was a tough week for marketers who hoped to translate social media buzz into revenue. "Sharknado" proved that social media can make noise disproportionate to its actual impact, and the tepid box office generated by "Pacific Rim" last weekend suggested that it's dangerous to assume that social-media excitement surrounding a film is representative of a broader audience's interest. Warner Bros. had high hopes for "Pacific Rim" based in part on pre-release social-media buzz, but the film's actual box office results seemed to indicate that once the vocal fans had seen the film, not too many other movie-goers were all that interested in it.

Syfy isn't giving up on "Sharknado," though. Yesterday, trying to strike while the social-media iron is still hot, the channel announced plans to release a sequel—or maybe a prequel—to the original "Sharknado" in 2014.

'Sharknado 2,' set in New York City, greenlit by SyFy Channel, New York Daily News