Snakes on The Net Fail to Put Butts in the Seats

Lev13than writes "An article in The Globe & Mail discusses the disappointing performance of Snakes on a Plane. Despite extensive Internet hype and unprecedented audience involvement in the movie's development, it barely slithered into first place with a meager $13.8M weekend box office. 'The Internet stuff was just fun that people were having with it, but I don't think that necessarily meant that those people wanted to see the movie... those who had made that decision based their decision more on the traditional marketing than on all this Internet buzz.' Was all of the hype about blogger power just that — hype?"

Comments

One more possibility

[dracocat]

There is one major possibility that everybody is forgetting.

That is, that this movie could have quite possibly ended dead last without the Internet hype. I think the only reason they made anything at all was because of the hype.

Re:One more possibility

[eln]

This thing made over $15 million, recouping just over half of its $30 million budget in one weekend. I think New Line was expecting the hype to make this the highest grossing film of all time or something, and are therefore disappointed that they "only" got $15 million.

There are 2 reasons this film was not a total flop:
1.) Internet hype
2.) Samuel L. Jackson.

The Samuel L. Jackson point is important because without an actor so popular and easily parodied on the Internet, this movie would never have generated the hype that it did.

This film will be profitable, which is a lot more than they can say about a lot of the movies they make. New Line needs to accept this windfall and quit bitching about it.

Re:One more possibility

[Tackhead]

> In addition, I think that this movie will probably see a LOT more profits on DVD than in the theater. For example, I'd love to take my wife to see it, but it just isn't an important enough movie to us to bring in the babysitter to watch the kids. We'd much rather wait until it hits DVD, then watch it in the comfort of our own home. It will be just as much fun there, and quite a bit more comfortable.

You're missing the point. Snakes is best viewed in a theater. Preferably a theater full of drunk and rowdy wise-asses who are gleefully MST3King every line they can.

Farkers who saw Snakes on a Plane at one of the opening night parties or at other midnight showings over the first weekend got a treat. The real test will be whether the theaters are as rowdy at any late-night showings this weekend. If the movie can draw a cult following for a second weekend, audience participation might snowball and take off.

Like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, seeing "Snakes on a DVD" in the privacy and comfort of your home misses the whole point of the experience, which was audience partici-SAY IT!-pation. Like RHPS, SoaP is a "meh" movie when viewed in the privacy of one's own home. Also like RHPS, SoaP was a hell of a lot of fun when the audience is yelling things like "Red Bull gives your product placement wings!", counting down the last few seconds to snakularity, "First one to scream gets it in the tits!", throwing snakes around the theater at the appropriate moments, yelling "snakes on a cart!" when the beverage cart shows up, appending "Bitch!" to some of Sam's lines, and so on.

Why yes

[keesh]

It only came first. What a disappointment. I'd much rather it had come zeroth, that would have been a much better indication of success.

Hollywood made a serious mistake

[RLiegh]

all of those bloggers making SoaP jokes? They were laughing at, not with the marketroids and hollywood in general. It was derision, nothing else.

I know that I don't generally shell out cash for things I'm derisive of, that's for sure.

Did I read that right?

[BeBoxer]

It was the highest grossing movie this weekend, right? First place? What were they hoping for? Zeroth place? I mean really. The 'buzz' was that it was basically a stupid movie with no plot. And it still made it to the top. And they complain? Man, talk about a sore winner.

Exactly

[Megaweapon]

This movie debut - 10 years ago = Complete and utter bust. The money it made was due to the Internet and very little else. If anything it was a wakeup call to Hollywood in how much money can be made by "marketing" to the appropriate audience (although of course with SoaP it was mostly accidental ;)

Re:Exactly

[gad_zuki!]

>This movie debut - 10 years ago = Complete and utter bust.

Naww. There was considerable non-blog based hype. The wacky trailers, word of mouth, etc. I think this movie would have done just as well without the so called internet hype. There's a great deal of over-estimation of the number and influence levels of 'internet people.' Seriously. If all the net-based hype refelected reality then:

Bill Gates would be serving his fourth year in prison.
John Kerry would be president.
Richard Stallman would be on television.
Churches would fold up because of lack of interest.
Anime would be everywhere.
Star Trek would have its own cable channel. Or two.

etc. The net isn't reality. Now Hollywood knows this.

Re:Exactly

[Ethan Allison]

That's Slashdot, not the internet.

Re:Exactly

[westlake]

There's a great deal of over-estimation of the number and influence levels of 'internet people.' Seriously. If all the net-based hype refelected reality then: Bill Gates would be serving his fourth year in prison. John Kerry would be president. Richard Stallman would be on television. Churches would fold up because of lack of interest. Anime would be everywhere. Star Trek would have its own cable channel. Or two. etc. The net isn't reality. Now Hollywood knows this.

We are ten years past the time when "Internet Person" could be defined by the interests and obsessions of the Geek.

The Theater Experience is Dead

[TheAngryMob]

While I'm interested in seeing the film, my wife and I just can't swallow the wretched ticket prices when, for cost of two admissions, we can OWN THE DVD. Not rent, own. And that's not even factoring in gas or babysitting costs.

Add to that the cost of consessions and the sheer rudeness of humanity (talking to your neighbor, talking on your cellphone, text messaging, kicking the back of my chair) I'm just not interested in going to see a film on the big screen.

So, am I going to shell out big bucks to watch commercials, listen to other people's conversations, and then sit through a B-grade flick? Hell no.

Re:The Theater Experience is Dead

[AsnFkr]

The theater experience isn't dead, you're just old. Trust me, I'm old too.

Re:The Theater Experience is Dead

[generic-man]

SoaP was worth seeing on opening night at a giant beautiful theater specifically for the "sheer rudeness of humanity." It was worth $10 to have 800+ other people laughing and cheering through all of the deliciously awful moments of the movie.

Some of the early reviews compared SoaP to a 2000s-era "Rocky Horror Picture Show" for the level of audience participation involved. If you rented RHPS from Netflix and watched it at home, you wouldn't get the same experience as watching it at a theater full of eclectic movie fans.

well yeah

[circletimessquare]

when you saw a dancing baby, did you want a baby?

when some turkish dude said "i kiss you!" did you want to kiss him?

did watching the hamster dance make you want to buy a hamster?

when cats said all our base are belong to him, did you want to play zerowing?

when star wars kid valiantly fought with canadian air, did you want to buy a light sabre?

did watching jibjab's "this land is our land" change your vote?

no, to all of that

so why would laughing at snakes on a plane make you want to go to the movies?

dumb internet fads are, guess what, nothing but dumb internet fads

they don't translate into anything, excep time wasted at work and school

Poof!

[bigattichouse]

Its amazing how the internet makes you forget about the real, actual world around you... how things that seem amazingly omnipresent really don't exist anywhere else. Its sort of its own little fantasy world, run by hyperactive squirrels on crack.

"Serenity," anyone?

[elrous0]

Everyone remember the geek buzz over "Serenity" and how it was going to revive the Firefly franchise and prove how much power internet and geek buzz can provide? Then it absolutely DIED at the box office.

We geeks tend to forget that we are in the TINY MINORITY of the population. Joe Sixpack doesn't hang out on /. and internet fan boards.

-Eric

It did exactly as expected, to be honest

[mbourgon]

Tracking said it would do roughly what it did - average for a mid-August-horror-release. It's simply that we all thought it would do well, because everyone we know knew about it. Watch the Daily Show's interview - everyone there probably went to see it. Guess what - they were the demographic anyhow. I think the name may have alienated some viewers, but it wouldn't have gotten people like me - I hate horror films, I went solely to participate. It was gorier than I would have liked, but a fun time was had by all 10 of us in the theater.

I think this counts as the "Howard Dean effect". Prior to one of the primaries, everyone thought he'd come in first, because he had this huge internet buzz. Turns out it didn't matter. Even if it's all of us techno-geeks, we're still a small percentage of the populace.

Re:Wrong audiance for this topic

[eln]

The Internet + Lower than expected profits = Piracy. Everyone knows that.

-MPAA

Where do I find this 'hype' stuff?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I surf the web plenty. I hang out on /. and boingboing and read the headlines on news.google.com. I have my own blog and I dip into the web sites of the major news outlets. Occasionally I'll check what's popular on youtube. I even listen to the radio and read billboards on the way to work. Oh...and I work in the movie business and hear gossip.

I don't remember seeing any of this 'hype' stuff. I remember seeing a couple of mentions on the web, and then a few days before release I saw some news stories claiming that there was lots of hype - probably fewer than I'd expect for a major summer movie release. So someone, please tell me before I miss the next lot of hype. Where do I see this 'hype' stuff? Is there a 'hype' web site? Is there a mailing list I need to subscribe to? Without it I just feel like I'm not connecting with therest of society.

Re:Why Mine Wasn't

[Chris Burke]

Years ago there was the viral marketing about The Blair Witch Project. I wondered what all the buzz was about and saw it. To me it was money down the drain. I didn't care for it and became a bit cynical about film pushed this way. Now if someone I knew who had similar tastes and saw a film and liked it, which I used to do, I'd give it a try.

Well I actually liked Blair Witch a lot, it being one of the only horror movies to ever instill real emotions of fear in me (having been lost in the woods before helped me get into the movie though). Yet I'm still cynical of any attempts to do "viral" marketing or anything of the sort. The reason is because a movie is marketed that way, or any other way, and some other exec says "Huh, they used this marketing technique, and their movie was a success. We should use this technique for our movie, and we will also be successfull." Note the lack of any consideration for the quality of the movies. To them, "grassroots" is just a phenomenon to be exploited for their own benefit. So I never trust them.

Now like you say sometimes I do find people whose opinions I trust. In this sense, I think they made a big mistake by not having pre-screenings for the press. If I had heard the reviews before hand -- which basically say that given B-movie expectations, the film exceeds them -- I may have been more likely to see the movie on opening weekend. "Snakes on a Plane" with Samuel Jackson sounds awesome, but am I going to trust those hollywood fuckers with my $8 based on a name and a star? If pre-release internet buzz had been matched with critical acclaim, then maybe that buzz would have turned into ticket sales like they hoped.

But really this article should be titled "Movie producers shocked to discover that Internet still isn't replacement for real world".

Reverent v. Irreverent Community

[sielwolf]

The problem with the SOAP fan community was that it was unlike any other fan community that has ever existed and that is the inherent irreverence for the source material. Even cult movies like Rocky Horror or Plan 9 from Outer Space hinge on the fact that the source material is sacrosanct. Sure, people dress up and people show canned responses to well-known sequences... but the sequences never change, the films never change, the experience never changes. Sure, folks might come up with more elaborate costumes or better cynical jokes but the material is involatile. And you can say the same about the very film prints of SOAP except-

all of its community was built before a single frame was seen.

SOAP was an insipid idea encapsulated in a four word title. Other than that? It was an open canvas.

And the online community ran with it. It made jokes, it made photoshop, comic strips, stupid video, fake trailers, Photoshop Phridays, crap songs. And the convergence of social software just helped fuel it. Blogger, Youtube, Photobucket. In the end 99% of all original content related to Snakes on a Plane was generated outside the official film itself.

Not only that, but SOAP was something you could participate in. 15 minutes in photoshop and a couple of clicks and your picture of Mace Windu sitting on a Dune sandworm with "Yes, they deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell!" written poorly in Pbrush.exe could end up on a dozen blogs. SOAP was whatever you contributed to it. Even academics and culture critics are getting into it. There are going to be papers, books, theories, conjecture. Someone is going to approach it from a Baudrillardian philosophical perspective and say SOAP was the first movie to truly capture the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

Technology and society met at a point where this was inevitable. It just took four little words and an idea that everyone could appreciate the straight-faced stupidity of.

Because of this, the actual frames of the movie are sort of irrelevant. After six months of run up, it was just another signal against the whole span of content out there. And to be honest, it wasn't even as creative or funny as a lot of that anonymous posters came up with.

The movie is what it is: a generic B horror/suspense film. And anyone looking at just the screen will see that. But those who where out there last Thursday at 10:00 in a theater full of high schoolers and college kids hearing the last ticks of summer? That was the real Snakes on a Plane. People hissing, screaming, yelling. It was a truly shared communal experience. The content on the screen was mere pretext. It was a nation-wide community that hadn't been forced down from some marketing firm that went from flash to bang in six months. MTV, Nike, Universal-Vevendi didn't tell anyone to do this. I have to agree with the guys at RuthlessReviews.com, that's pretty heartening.