Twittering Star Trek
May 11th, 2009Posted by: J.W. Crump Posted in Blogs
Twitter has completely changed the ease by which viewers can quickly review a movie. It only takes 140 characters to type “This movie was awesome!” or “This movie was an abomination of film!” Many Twitter users even talk about the film while they are watching it, curtly ignoring the friendly reminders to turn off their cell phones before the film begins.
I decided to do a quick analysis of tweets from this weekend concerning the new Star Trek flick. I haven’t seen the film yet, but the positive reviews and hype surrounding it have definitely peaked my interest. After taking a gander at the tweets, I’m nearly raving to go see it.
I took a look at 500 tweets from Saturday, May 9, a day after the movie had premiered in theaters. Below is a pie chart with the breakdown.
180 of the tweets were people telling the world that they were going to see the movie, in the middle of seeing the movie, or just leaving from seeing the movie. 155 tweets described the movie in some positive manner, with one-word compliments ranging from ‘wicked’ to ‘brilliant’. 15 tweets cited negative things about the film, from complaints about canon changes to bad acting. If a tweet said something about seeing the film but included a positive or negative review, the tweet was classified as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ and not in the ‘going’ category.
Of the remaining tweets, 35 of them were links to reviews or news articles about high box office sales. 10 talked about how the film was not for “just fans” of the series. The remaining 55 out of 500 didn’t fall into any of these categories.
In addition to the above categorical analysis, 50 of the 500 tweets contained @replies to someone, showing the conversation emerging. Only one included the hash tag #startrek, while another one contained the hilarious #whyidonthaveagirlfriend. Also, seven mentioned the Burger King collectable glasses sold in conjunction with the film’s release.
There were far more than 500 tweets on Saturday about the movie, and if this sample is any indication, the Twitter world highly recommends the film. While I certainly don’t approve of people using their cell phones in the theater, it’s pretty amazing to think that you can immediately know your friends’ impressions of a movie before seeing it yourself.
Perhaps films should use Twitter to help promote their movies? Specifically assigned Twittering employees of the production could answer question about the film as well as promote it online. Several TV shows like Eureka are already going similar things so it’d definitely be worth looking into.
