Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
Years ago I used to read the Detroit Free Press, which had a little grid in the back, which summarised what various critics thought of films. I learned which leaned most often my way and followed their advice. Most often we were in sync. Now I just chance it, mostly on trailers, of indie fliks. Hollywood stuff you usually get all the good bits and the whole plot in trailers.
Upon Scott Kurtz' endorsement I saw Little Miss Sunshine, which is quite the little gem.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Half of the Slashdot crowd will just download the flick and wonder why the producers are so disappointed in the film's performance at the box office.
Then they will post about the virtues of free software... knowing full well that they really mean beer.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
What, they thought we were serious? *blink*
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.
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.
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 ;)
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
with all the bombs lately, maybe they are waiting for word of mouth to see if it is ANY GOOD?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
After 6 months of internet hype, "I'm TIRED of these MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES on this MOTHERFUCKING PLANE!", plain and simple. I'll wait for the DVD, thanks.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
apparently there are snake in the Mother F***in Theater as well
The internet is a buzz for months with people making jokes about how stupid this movie is going to be, and they are suprised its not the next Titanic?!
I given what people expected $13M isn't too bad. It did get first spot, if barely. It will probably still gross more than "A Prairie Home Companion".
I haven't seen it, but I have heard it is better than expected!
Think Deeply.
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.
meh
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
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Not nearly as many as New Line Cinema was guessing, I bet. Even so, SoaP was all the rage for a few months, so it's easy to get into the notion that it was going to be a smashing hit.
But one needs to realize that what you generally see/hear on the Internet isn't necessarily representative of the populace in general. Back in 2004, I was sure that Kerry was going to take the Presidential slot by quite a bit, despite being a Bush supporter (yes, I've realized my mistakes since then). Then Bush barely beat out Kerry, instead.
So what happened, both then and now? A few things.
First, the Internet is a great thing that covers the entire globe. This means that you're going to get opinions from a lot of places whose opinion, frankly, doesn't really matter overall. (Not that they shouldn't state their opinion, but someone from Russia talking about who they would vote for in the American primaries doesn't make a lick of difference.) This residual noise is going to confound the actual outcome to a point.
Second, turn out. While a lot of people say they'll go out and vote for Kerry, or go out and see the movie, that doesn't mean they'll actually do it. In this instance, people on Fark set up SoaP "Parties" for people to get together, drink a bit, then go laugh at the movie. Many of these requested RSVPs, and a lot of the people who hosted such parties said that a good portion of the RSVPs didn't show up.
Third, anonymity and 'fitting in'. People can claim on the internet to do things or to have done things that they will never or have never done. A Bush supporter that is an active member of a website that's predominantly anti-Bush is more likely to make anti-Bush comments so s/he won't be ridiculed. Similarly, someone might say that they are interested in SoaP so they can be part of the online group, but really don't give a damn.
It's the very reason that Slashdot has their little blurb above all polls:
The internet is wildly inaccurate except under the most precise of circumstances and settings, and even then the numbers can be flubbed.
At least this means that we (hopefully) won't see a lot of studios trying to build internet hype, when all the internet hype was created entirely by fans.
The studio execs wanted to call it "Pacific Air 414" for chrissakes!
Fortunately Sam L. went to them and said, "I want those motherfuckin' snakes on that motherfuckin' plane!"
When told to watch his language because it was a PG-13 movie he said, "It's English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?"
KFG
I'm tired of these motherfucking articles about motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane!
This guy's the limit!
You must not have seen this movie in theatres. It was an incredible experience. The entire audience was into it, and this movie will be lost if you do not see it with a good audience. This is not something that can be duplicated anywhere else. I was in a theatre full of people, ready to see snakes on a motherfucking plane, and bringing that energy with them. Watching this alone on DVD would NOT be the same. At all.
I think they could have made more of the 'insensitivity' angle. They should have marketed it with: if you do not go and see Snakes on a Plane, then the terrorists have already won. It would also have helped to bring forward the release date to August 16th, planned date for the liquid explosive attacks on transatlantic jets.
It would be handy if the movie included some suspicious bearded character on the plane who in the end turns out to save it Wesley-Crusher style. I haven't yet seen the film, so for all I know perhaps it does.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
A friend (or, possibly, an enemy) of yours signed you up for that. They had a web site where you could put in a phone number, and then a few things like what the person does for a living, a hobby, a method of transporation, a noun and an adjective (no, sorry, the last two are Mad-libs.) and you'll get a call from Samuel L. Jackson's voice with the appropriate things filled in. (So, I guess it pretty much is a Mad-lib.)
As an interesting aside, the caller ID should have been your friend's phone number (or whatever number they entered on the web site). I don't know by what method they spoofed the caller ID - I didn't even know it was legal.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I thought the buzz WAS the product.
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.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
That was the single worst part of the movie. Just the way the line was placed in the movie (with him saying it to all the survivors left on the plane) was way too jarring. I think it'd have been much better if he said it to himself while hunting around to fix the ventilation system. That would have made those "motherfuckin'"s fit a lot better. ("I am so (*kill snake*) GODDAMN SICK (*kill snake*) of these MOTHERFUCKIN SNAKES (*kill snake*).. on this STUPID-ASS MOTHERFUCKIN PLANE! (*beat a dead snake*)" - something like that.
The rest of the movie was basically a campy variation of the old "aircraft disaster" genre (yes, lest we forget, it used to be an entire genre - which is why Airplane could lampoon it...) mixed with some thriller movie standards (like the amusing kills, the victims you're meant to hate, the various clumsy attempts to create tension with close-calls before the all-out assault begins, etc...)
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
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.
What is music when you despise all sound?