The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Andrew Vestal:

I don't think the Blair Witch Project's success was due to anything Net-related, though. I think it was due to people seeing it and telling other people about it. It also had a very good real-world marketing campaign which was probably more directly responsible for its success than anything on the Net. It was the constant creepy footage of the kids lost in the woods that sold the public on it--not the website. It may have been one of the first movies to use the Net as a marketing tool, but it was traditional hype that sold most of the tickets.

Speaking of huge-Net successes that fail to generate real-world returns, does anyone remember the A.I. webgame?

That quotation reminds me of the whole Snakes on a Plane phenomenon. I'm not sure if that was its intent.

I saw Snakes on a Plane last night with a group of friends, and we all had a great time. Moreover, most of us agreed that Snakes on a Plane was a legitimately better and more enjoyable film than the leaden tentpole "blockbusters" Hollywood has been subjecting us to this summer. It was incredibly silly, but it wasn't insultingly stupid.

But I've noticed a lot of negative reviews of SoaP focusing not on the movie, but on the pre-release hype and the "bloggers" who hyped it up; as if they should be held responsible for the movie that came out yesterday evening. Casuality between silly hype and silly movie seemed all messed up.

The kicker is: the theater was 2/3 empty on opening night. Anecdotal evidence and Friday returns suggest that SoaP is a big financial bust, despite stratospheric Internet buzz. Last movie this happened to was Serenity: Internet approved, box office failure.

Have there been any cases of "Internet hype" turning into tangible, real-world returns? If not, is there a way to use the Internet "correctly" so that huge online buzz will produce actual results, and not just a bunch of starry-eyed MySpacers?

Comment statistics for Andrew Vestal on the Making Light blog

Total: 2 comments. View all these comments on a single page.