Twitter? A Threat To Film Or Just An Excuse For Falling Movie Views?

New Threat To The Film Industry

This news article is from the Press of Atlantic City, which is a city in the state of New Jersey, USA. The article was published on September 1st 2009 and is written by journalist, Michael Sragow.

The article is teaching how if people use social media e.g. Twitter to review a film, it can lead to many people choosing whether to view or ignore a new movie. It also mentions how the author has been influenced to skip a movie due to reviews by people on his Twitter account.

However, it also shows how the film industry are manipulating the use of Twitter to their advantage, for example, Weinstein Company used asocial networking on their film "Inglorious Bastards" and packed a Comic-Con film screening with people who had won tickets through Twitter. The company performed a silmilar stunt at it's Grauman's Chinese Theartre premiere, creating a Twitter Meet Up, which was attended by high ranking celebrities.

iPhone application Flixter, also helps to give both positive and negative publicity, on there people rate and review a movie and due to promotion of the movie "The Proposal" huge profits were gained.

However some believe that the internet doesn't have such a huge effect on people. The article mentions that in a previous poll 88% of people weren't bothered by what they read on Twitter.

If I could use one quote to sum up the article it would be:

"Just two years ago, if I saw a movie I loved or I hated, I'd be able to tell a dozen friends, tops,Now I can be walking out of a theater as the credits are rolling and immediately tell 500 people what I thought. ... It's never been this easy to be this influential."-John Singh.

In my own opinion I see it that Twitter can have a huge impact on the film industry, if my friends tell me that a film is going to be terrible then I will not watch it, or I'll wait for the DVD to come out and be severely reduced, however if a movie gets a hugely positive reception from my friends I will be far more likely to view it at the cinema.