The Twitter Effect on Box Office Sales – Real or Perceived?

bruno twitter

Hollywood seems to be abuzz about the Twitter Effect recently, blaming the micro-blogging service for severe drops in box office revenues in recent movies such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s controversial Bruno. In a recent article from The Baltimore Sun, one person describes the ease and effectiveness of using Twitter for disseminating bite size movie reviews on the fly:

“Just two years ago, if I saw a movie I loved or I hated, I’d be able to tell a dozen friends, tops,” says John Singh, who works for the movie and social networking Web site Flixster. “Now, I can be walking out of a theater as the credits are rolling and immediately tell 500 people what I thought. … It’s never been this easy to be this influential.”

Today, within seconds of coming out of a movie theater (or during the movie itself for that matter), people are able to easily broadcast their opinions about their movie experience to a potentially large audience of followers. Trendrr has found that Twitter volume rises in correspondence with a movie’s gross. But can what the Twitterati say materially impact a movie’s gross receipts within in 24 hours of release?

According to the Twitter Effect theory, instant mini-reviews from the opening night of a movie can make or break a movie’s gross as soon as the day after. We decided to test out this theory, examining three movies that opened on the same day – August 14^th -and the possible effect of Twitter sentiment on the movie’s box office the following day, August 15^th. The movies we analyzed were District 9, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, and The Time Traveler’s Wife. As a point of comparison we analyzed Twitter sentiment on Bruno as well, the movie that sparked the Twitter Effect debate.We analyzed 150 random Twitter reviews from each of the movies’ opening nights for positive/neutral vs. negative reviews. Following is an analysis of the sentiments expressed about the four movies on the first day of opening:

If we look at the volume of negative comments vs. positive or neutral reviews (the vast majority of neutral reviews were informational statements such as “Just saw X film”), District 9 and The Goods were the most well-received of the four with minimal negative reaction, followed by The Time Traveler’s Wife and Bruno (closely following). Does the proportion of negative chatter on Twitter correspond to the change in gross on the second day of release? The changes to gross on the second day of release for each movie are as follows according to Variety.com:

Movie Name	% Fall of Daily Gross from Opening Day to Day After	% of Negative Tweets
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard	-9%	7%
District 9	-11%	7%
The Time Traveler’s Wife	-17%	19%
Bruno	-39%	21%

As shown in our sample set above, all of these movies experienced a decrease in gross the day after opening, with Bruno’s being the highest. The Goods and District 9, which both experienced about 7% negative Twitter reaction, experienced similar drops in gross (-9% and -11%). Time Traveler’s Wife had a higher drop in gross of -17%, also on par with the amount of negativity expressed. On the other hand, Bruno – which experience only slightly more negativity than The Time Traveler’s Wife – had a fall in gross that was much more drastic than all of the movies we analyzed, at -39%.

According to this data, there does seem to be a loose correlation between early reviews on Twitter and the following day’s box office receipts. But did the tweets actually have a direct impact on each movie’s gross (cause and effect)? Perhaps. But it seems that Twitter does not deserve as much blame for impacting revenue as Hollywood may think, especially in the case of Bruno. In fact, one can hypothesize that reviewers on Twitter were more apt to like the movie than the general public, since overall the tweeted reviews were nearly 80% favorable.

Examining the context of the Twitter reviews, many people found it offensive but liked how hilarious it was. The negativity that was expressed stemmed largely from the excessive nudity in the beginning of the movie that caused some people to walk out. However, the people who did tweet about Bruno generally were not the ones who walked out of the theater. One could even argue that Twitter may have actually saved Bruno from an even more drastic fall in gross.

While this exercise serves to validate the use of Twitter monitoring as an early barometer on how people feel about their entertainment experiences, it also cautions that Twitter is still only one way in which word of mouth spreads. The qualitative insights gleaned from Twitter are exceedingly valuable, but additional sources of feedback (e.g. blogs, forums & boards, surveys, etc.) would make an overall analysis of consumer sentiment and reaction more robust.

What is clear is that Twitter has given people an easy way to share information and opinion with broader audiences quickly, and at the current rate of adoption Twitter promises to become an increasingly important source of information for both consumers and marketers.

- Katty Lein, Analyst, Customer Insights at 360i