The Hobbit Vs. Dark Knight Rises Vs. Prometheus – Breaking It Down, With Graphs And Everything

In the days before Christmas, knockout trailers were released for three of the most keenly anticipated films on the 2012 calendar: The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus and The Hobbit. I can tell you from the statistics here at Bleeding Cool that these films are generating an awful lot of interest amongst Little Bleeders… but how about in the world at large?

Way to Blue are a PR and social media company in London and, sometimes, the people who invite me to screenings, set up interviews and the like. They’ve been crunching the numbers on those three big films and compiled a series of interesting observations.

I’m going to share what they came up with, then compare it to what I can observe specifically here at Bleeding Cool.

Looking at Twitter, they sample which of the three films got the biggest share. Here’s their pie chart:

There are social media buttons on the Bleeding Cool stories for each of those trailers. Here are the usage stats for those:

• The Hobbit: 55 tweets, 1 Google plus, 276 Facebook likes
• Prometheus: 50 tweets, 2 Google plus, 157 Facebook likes
• The Dark Knight Rises: 37 tweets, 3 Google plus, 119 Facebook likes

There are mitigating circumstances, of course – bootlegged versions of the Dark Knight trailer were plentiful, and there was even a pirated version of the Prometheus clip, bobbing about.

And this is only for social media actions that use the buttons on the site and does not consider, for example, retweets of our original links leading to the story.

Still, it seems that that Dark Knight garnered a lower share of the excitement here at Bleeding Cool. Not what everybody would have expected, perhaps?

Way to Blue went on to break down six characters and other talking points from the trailers, and ranked those in order of how often they were mentioned on Twitter.

1. Alien
2. Bane
3. Space Jockey
4. Bilbo
5. Stadium Explosion (in Dark Knight Rises)
6. Gandalf

The peak date for references to Alien in relation to Prometheus was apparently December 23rd, which also happens to be when I published my “Closer Look” at that trailer and made plenty of connections between the two films. Must have been something in the air. Apparently, 1 in 5 tweeters made the connection – and still Fox won’t officially admit to it, the cheeky gamesplayers.

Incidentally, my trailer analysis post got 50 tweets, 5 Google plus and 65 Facebook likes from the page. It also managed a phenomenal amount of page views, nicely into 5 figures,

The final revelation from Way to Blue’s breakdown concerns the buzz surrounding the directors of the films. Here’s the rank of the three big names, ordered by number of mentions:

1. Peter Jackson
2. Christopher Nolan
3. Ridley Scott

Does this suggest greater affection for Jackson overall? Way to Blue at least suggest “a film title change or a stronger poster mention for the New Zealander. ”

Of these three films, the one to gather the most page views on Bleeding Cool overall is The Dark Knight Rises, and largely thanks to a single post – The Dark Knight Rises Plot Thickens: Batman’s First Encounter With John Blake Revealed. It’s been popular since I wrote in April.

That story only got 41 tweets, 5 Google plus and 240 Facebook likes from the page, but that’s not in step with its monster traffic, not at all.

I’ve counted up the amount of unique user visits we at Bleeding Cool saw for stories published in December, as the anticipation built for these trailers, and then peaked around their release:

1. Prometheus – 38,193
2. The Hobbit – 29,313
3. The Dark Knight Rises – 17, 142

Though I do want to note that the single biggest story of these was my close look at The Hobbit trailer.

So, in short it looks like these three films are each generating a tremendous amount of online interest. Let’s see what happens at the box office. It will be sad, but fascinating, if one of them somehow fails to perform.

And by one of them I can only really mean Prometheus. There’s now way Rises or Hobbit can fail to milk the cash cow dry, is there?