Twitter Box Office Update - April 30th, 2010

A Nightmare On Elm Street had a massive Thursday with 6,244 tweets or 14.4% of the total Twitter buzz for all films opening in the next 4 months. By comparison, The Crazies had 2,134 tweets its Thursday before release (5,012 for the full week), Shutter Island had 5,340 (13,273 for the week), and Saw VI had 4,359 (8,975 for the full week). Of those 6244 tweets, 1,216 were positive (19.47%) and 590 negative (9.45%). While this 6,244 number is indeed impressive (9th biggest Thursday for a Friday opener) it is a ways below my expected 9,000 as it didn't have the explosion in the later hours as I had envisaged. The end result is a week tally of 15,843 for the film. The good news is the explosion on Thursday for films in this genre usually drive the ratio up significantly, but since its expansion this week was much more metered (6.83 Monday to Thursday) this should bring its ratio down a ways. This 6.83 week expansion brings it closer to Shutter Island's 7.25 than it does to Saw VI's 7.66 or The Crazies' 6.00. As such I'm going to bring its predicted ratio down slightly to 1,000 to be more in line with Shutter Island. The net result is my This should prediction remains the same from yesterday: ~$16 million on Friday and $39 million for the weekend.

Furry Vengeance again had a poor return with 641 tweets, 1.50% of the total tweet market share (tweet share?). This gave it 1,580 for the full week. By comparison, The Spy Next Door had 623 tweets its Thursday before release (1,452 for the full week), and The Tooth Fairy had 640 (1,720 for the full week). Of those 641 tweets it had yesterday, 114 were positive (17.78%) and 63 negative (9.83%). The writing has been on the wall for a while that this was going to under perform, its just a matter of how poorly. The poor ratings coupled with the theater count leads me to believe it is going to perform much more similar to Spy Next Door than Tooth Fairy. As such I'm going to go with a ~650 ratio estimate and $2.4 million Friday, $8 million for the full weekend.

Check back Saturday to see Friday's numbers and the actual Twitter ratios for the weekend and follow @AlexBOXOFFICE on Twitter for additional updates.

Twitter tracking history. (For 2009's ratio history please check here.)

The ratio is the number of tweets per $1 million of Friday Box Office gross. A film with 1,000 tweets and a $10 million Friday would therefore have a ratio of 100. In general, films that appeal to very young or older audiences have lower ratios since those audiences are not big users of Twitter. By comparison, films that appeal to younger audiences (18-35) have much higher ratios since those audiences are much more active users of Twitter.