The Avengers Won The Super Bowl Tweet-Off... But Who Lost? And What Does It Mean For Box Office?

[Brendon Connelly]

I was too busy scrabbling to post working versions of all of the trailers to pay much attention to Twitter on Sunday, but as you'd expect, all of the movie promotions aired during the Super Bowl generated a certain amount of social media hubbub.

Discussion that can be quantified pretty easily, at least in terms of volume. Which is exactly what PR and social media company Way To Blue have done. Here's their resulting infographic, showing what percentage of Twitbuzz revolved around which film:



What this doesn't account for is the amount of Tweets flying around about films without promos during the show. For example, I know that lots of people were chattering about TV spots for The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man, under the misapprehension that they were in fact going to appear.

And it doesn't include The Hunger Games, the spot for which aired during the pre-game show.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, in my eyes, is the relatively strong showing for Battleship - though it did come early, and people may have tired of tweeting as the show went on, or become distracted by their beer, football and seven layer dip.

I've looked back over the amount of traffic these spots generated here at Bleeding Cool. Here's the chart, from most viewed to least:

• The Avengers
• The Hunger Games
• John Carter
• Battleship
• Act of Valor
• GI Joe
• The Lorax

Incidentally, the MET Life commercial with the wealth of cartoon character cameos outperformed all but The Avengers. Which probably suggests that Disney should get their Roger Rabbit sequel off the blocks, pronto. And the Transformers theme park spot would have slotted in between Act of Valor and GI Joe.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened with the comic book titles had Spider-Man and Batman also shown up to the party, but Spidey was really only a day late and, looking at the figures for the trailer, he came half way between The Avengers and John Carter.

I guess I was remiss in not posting the Dictator spot when it appeared a week ago so, for completeness sake, here it is now:



Nothing new there, really.

What remains to be seen is what relationship, if any, these Twitter stats have to the eventual box-office of a film. I recall that Bruno, with some aptness, was the first film to be discussed in respect of "The Twitter Effect." Sales on the film dropped off sharply after the first night, and there was some speculation that bad word of mouth was disseminating quickly via Twitter.

I don't know about that, but it's definitely a theory. I think social media analysis is interesting, and has a place, but I hope it evolves into something more rigorous and detailed. It's only then we'll be able to see a real shape appearing, and find out what kind of effect online buzz might, or might not, have on a film's performance.

[Blackfist]

[Dans07sti]

Are your links not able to work with the iphone? They never work for me and always have to go back to the main one.