Blogs on a Snake. Irrelevant?

The verdict is in. Now its opening weekend is over, it’s time to count the votes on Snakes on a Plane.

This is what the public thought, com­paring the takings from it’s opening weekend in the US to those of other summer blockbusters:

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 — $135.6M
Cars — $60.1M
Superman Returns — $52.5M
Talladega Nights — $47M
Step Up — $20.7M
World Trade Center — $18.7M
Snakes on a Plane — $15.8M

OK. and err… here’s what the blo­go­sphere was saying about the film prior to last weekend: “the event of the mil­lenium”, “viral mar­keting man­age­ment genius”, “It kind of points to the power of the Internet and in some way the evol­u­tion of the Internet”, “the folks pro­moting the upcoming movie Snakes of a Plane have managed to turn a somewhat silly sounding B-​​List movie into what will undoubtedly be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters”.

Well, they haven’t and it looks a lot like it isn’t.

So what does that mean? Is the blo­go­sphere com­pletely irrel­evant to what happens in the real world? Has the viral mar­keting lobby been carried away by its own hype? Last Sunday, Advertising Age wrote a salutory reality check, reminding the blo­go­sphere that there’s actually not that many of us and that few people are listening:

According to Jupiter Research, 7% of American adults write blogs and 22% read them; about 8% listen to podcasts and 5% use RSS feeds. According to a separate study by WorkPlace Print Media, 88% of the at-​​work audience doesn’t even know what RSS is. And recent data from word-​​of-​​mouth research group Keller Fay indicate 92% of brand con­ver­sa­tions were taking place offline.

The scep­ti­cism about blogs that these figures suggest may well seem proven by opening weekend of Snakes on a Plane, which appears to have com­pleted defeated the internet’s expect­a­tions. (USA Today emphas­ises this point, as you might expect).

In some repects it is proven, but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Snakes.

First of all, as Tara Hunt suggests, the film is quite a dif­ferent sort of movie to the others on the list. Not only is it certain to have a pretty niche appeal, “this is a movie about the audience”. Think about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Disastrous opening run in 1975, followed by thirty years of packed cinemas every week. Like Snakes, it had the same ‘so bad, it’s good’ appeal, which is hardly a mass-​​market hook. The same element of cult interest is there, albeit trans­ferred to the geek space. There’s the same audience par­ti­cip­a­tion elements, with movie­goers shouting out, joining in the dialogue and taking along rubber snakes to make the exper­i­ence less about watching the film and more about taking part. And that is how the film has been for months, with New Line re-​​shooting sections to match internet fans’ per­cep­tions that this is a film about Jules from Pulp Fiction in an aero­plane disaster movie. The film’s future pro­spects are perhaps a lot stronger than its current figures show.

The same thing goes for the stat­istics quoted above about the blo­go­sphere. Writing, reading and com­menting on blogs isn’t all that important right now to the majority of the pop­u­la­tion. That is changing every week. As the Ad Age article goes on to suggest, their power of influ­ence is already very high, con­sid­ering they’re so far from being main­stream. In six months, the number of blogs appears likely to have doubled, and the same six months after that. The space between niche and main­stream depends on how fast you’re moving.

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