Movie companies blame IM and TXT's for box office flops

[mysticgohan17]

Movie companies blame IM and TXT's for box office flops

This year is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster movies and According to movie executives the problem is... instant messaging!.
No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.
The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.
"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."
But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.
Five years ago, when summer movies were arguably just as bad as they are now, the average audience drop-off between a film's opening weekend and its second weekend was 40 per cent. This summer, it has been 51 per cent. In some cases, the drop-off has started between the film's opening on a Friday night and the main screenings on Saturday. The upshot: unsuccessful films disappearing from cinemas so fast that there is no time for second opinions.

[Solarjetman]

HA! yeah, that it. Because everyone knows that it takes SOOO much less time to type "this movie stinks" then just call and say "this movie stinks".

[g_shocker182]

No. There's no excuse for Gigli.

[tgpo]

I read this on slashdot. First the MPAA wants to take our right to backup movies, then they want to take our right to talk about them.

[jeex]

I read this on slashdot. First the MPAA wants to take our right to backup movies, then they want to take our right to talk about them.

kinda like how the nfl wont let you "account" or "describe" their football games without expressed written concent..

[tgpo]

kinda like how the nfl wont let you "account" or "describe" their football games without expressed written concent..

dude, they won't let you describe the games??? What is the world coming to??

[The village idiot]

OK, what about the flip side.

What if someone IM's their friends while in the middle of something like Lord of the Rings and says: "You must see this film!!!!". Do they account for that?

All bets say NO.

Mustly the movies that are coming out really suck! And paying a bunch of money for something that sucks isn't good. If the prices on the suck@ss movies was lower, maybe they wouldn't suck as badly?

OK some of them would suck even if you were payed to watch them....