Culture

Did Twitter Kill Brüno?

by Jordan Yerman | July 14, 2009 at 11:30 am

275 views | 14 Recommendations | 3 comments

Twitter has made it easy for word-of-mouth to spread faster than words from mouths to ears. Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest anything-for-a-laugh flick, is case in point. The movie opened huge on Friday, but ticket sales fell sharply for Saturday. Pundits were quick to blame Twitter, whose dulcet tweets carried the distinct undertone of scorn.

There's more to the story, though: not all the tweets were saying that Brüno was twerrible.

Though Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film was a smash success on Friday, its grosses dropped by 40% between then and Saturday. The movie still won the weekend, but it didn’t live up to the expectations of the studio, Universal, which paid $45 million for the right to distribute it.

Also, it's kind of hard to tell how many people these tweets (positive or negative) were actually reaching: remember, most people who try Twitter don't stick with it, and are just as likely to check out blogs instead. After all, it only scored a tepid 55 on Metacritic.

Also-also, there's a water-cooler factor to the movie: people could have gone to see it just to be in on what would surely be the hot topic around the water cooler on Monday morning, and enough negative buzz would ultimately deter those viewers. So, did Twitter kill Brüno?

Probably not, but it's always fun to speculate.

After all, such a quick drop from Friday to Saturday in opening weekend performance is uncommon, and if you thought that this post was some hand-wringing, then you definitely don't want to be in a Universal Studios office right now.

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Amy rich (not verified)

at 18:50 on July 14th, 2009

:) I am very surprised that such story is getting speculated in the market. but yes i think twitter can be culprit here although we publish our view about the movie, lots of people get influenced by such feed backs. Moreover nowadays people are always on internet most of them want to check the reviews before going to watch a flick as they do not want there money and time to be wasted in something useless.

Dimitri Konchin (not verified)

at 19:02 on July 14th, 2009

I think every person has its own views and perception about certain kind of cinema. If there are negative reviews there must be some positive reviews also about the BRUNO Unless the movie is total shit no one can make it a flop not even twitter. So to hold twitter responsible is total out of question.