Social Media Buzz: 'Pacific Rim' vs. 'Gravity'

Twitter gets credit for a lot things, including stuff as serious as facilitating revolutions in the Middle East, but it and other social media institutions are also irresistible tools for movie marketers. Because social media seems to be an easily quantifiable expression of the interests of a mass audience, it's tempting for studios to count tweets, shares and likes in order to decide which films to promote or even produce. But is social media buzz really a reliable indicator of how much the general public is interested in a given film?

Some recent examples would suggest that, no, it's not. Take the example of "Pacific Rim." The mega-budget sci fi action pic was the subject of an avalanche of social media traffic prior to its release; the film was mentioned in thousands of tweets, had hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook, and boasted tens of thousands of Flixster users who were planning to see it. All of this led some to speculate that the film was a potential blockbuster in the making.

It wasn't. The film opened with disappointing box-office grosses, and only some success overseas kept it from being a huge financial disaster.

Or consider "Sharknado." The schlocky Syfy original film made headlines when its first airing inspired a record number of tweets. Syfy tried to ride the wave of the buzz, heavily promoting repeat airings, making a grand announcement of a planned sequel, and even arranging unprecedented theatrical showings of the movie.

The result? The initial airing of "Sharknado" got ratings on par with other Syfy originals, and repeat airings saw gradually increasing ratings; the movie's biggest numbers were respectable for a Syfy original but not at all spectacular in a bigger sense. And interest in the theatrical showings was tepid.

Why doesn't social media buzz necessarily translate into mainstream success? First of all, Twitter users, while a large group, are atypically vocal and not a representative sample of the public at large; you can't assume that 100,000 tweets about your movie means that millions more people are interested but not tweeting. And you can't assume that just because there's buzz about your movie on Twitter that there's buzz anywhere else. Lots of people get their news from sources other than Twitter and Facebook, and if no one's talking about your movie in those other sources, millions of people have no way of knowing that anyone's talking about it at all.

Take the recent box-office hit "Gravity," for example. It, too, had a huge amount of pre-release social media buzz, but it went on to a record-breaking performance at the box office, too. The difference? It had buzz everywhere, not just on social media. Sandra Bullock was on every TV talk show promoting the film, every news organization was talking about it, and traditional media couldn't get enough of it. The lesson: social media buzz by itself means very little, and if you're a marketer making decisions based on tweet counts, you're taking a very risky gamble, indeed.