Is Hollywood Afraid of Twitter's Real-Time Review Effect?

There's an interesting article over at The Baltimore Sun, suggesting that real-time reviews from movie-goers after seeing a new film have really got movie studios worried, thanks to the knock-on effect they can have on box office stats. But is it true?

The article rests on the new phenomenon of Web-connected smartphone users Twittering their approval or disapproval of a movie very soon after seeing it. Twitter's obviously a powerful information broadcasting medium, and the way that re-Tweets can spread virally among networks of friends is becoming a useful news-gathering tool. But it's also a remarkably efficient way of spreading a message like "Movie X was terrible, don't waste your money" and if such a review came to your Twitter feed via a number of friends, you might consider avoiding it right from its opening night onwards. If that were the case for a large number of people, then first weekend figures for a movie (often quoted as a metric for a film's success) could take a serious hit.

Of course, a positive review could just as easily spread via Twitter--it's a medium which, on the whole, is used to distribute positive vibes, anyway. A number of positive Tweets in your Twitter feed may even tempt you to pop to the theater to take in a movie you hadn't previously considered, and that's clearly a good thing as far as the movie producers are concerned. Sounds like a no-score draw, over all doesn't it? Twitter isn't particularly ubiquitous yet either, and only a relatively small proportion of its user base access the system often enough to make a dent in movie-attendance figures.

But what the film industry may be actually worried about is Twitter's immediacy, and its potential for growth. People have been talking about movies since day one a century ago, and exploiting word of mouth marketing is a staple for the industry--the cell phone and SMSing have merely accelerated the pace of the debate, and increased the range of a positive or negative movie-goer review. The rise of the InterWebs has added another channel for such discussion, with both traditional media-style reviews, and even the inverted collectively-reviewed power of RottenTomatoes.com. But none of these methods of spreading an opinion of a movie have the one-to-many-peers real-time broadcast power of Twitter. Magnolia Picture's president, Eamonn Bowles, notes that "people will be Twittering during the opening credits--and leaving when they don't like them. [...] the next step [for the Twitter effect] is for studio marketing to manipulate it."

And that's actually what this article is all about--the studios, always keen to track the pulse of new social memes, are beginning to realize Twitter's power. That means as Twitter gets bigger and begins to penetrate society on a more everyday level, you can expect to hear more official promotion of flicks on the service, and probably even more nefarious antics like fake rave reviews being re-Tweeted.

[via TheBaltimoreSun]