Earlier this week, Hollywood revealed the Academy Award nominees for a year it would rather forget. "Box-Office Bust" was ABC's send up of 2011, with one stat that drives the point home: "Attendance figures haven’t been this low since 1995."
Maybe the movies were just bad. That's not the worst-case scenario. This is: Maybe the ways movie studios connect to their audiences are becoming outdated. In a year when TV saw the light of social media, movies apparently remained in the dark. But 2012 stands to be a different. New ideas are emerging, primarily outside of Hollywood influence, that could polish the silver screen's prospects.
In Hollywood's defense, movies are as difficult to match with social media as any form of entertainment. That brief PSA right before the movie starts -- Please Turn Off Your Phone -- kills the same second screen effect that is boosting TVs social footprint. But even if that were not a rule, there's not much real-time chat around movies, because moviegoers start watching at different times. And who wants to risk plot spoilers?
What works for TV won't work for movies, it seems. But there are ways to make movies more social and to make social media work better for movies. Here are three companies trying to do just that.
Watch It: A Movie Reminder And Friend-Based Finder
Maybe you watched the trailer for Girl With a Dragon Tattoo in the middle of 2011 and thought to yourself, I'm really into dark Scandinavian-based action movies with an obsession for body art. But by the time of the release, it was months since you saw that trailer. Actually, that's not a great example. It's the movie that doesn't get hyped during release that is easy to miss once it is released.
David Larkin has produced an independent film that was feted at festivals and forgotten beyond. It was that experience that drove him to help fans find what they need. Watch It is an app that allows you to log your intention for seeing that movie and also share that intent with friends. The friends, in the meantime, may have learned of a new movie from you and also log that intent. Once the movie is out, everyone who wanted to see it is notified.
"There's a lot of activity, obviously with FourSquare, around check-in space," says Larkin, founder of Plexus Entertainment. "We consider we're in the pre-check-in space."
Larkin sees potential in several directions with the idea. Not only is it a consumer app that could be highly valued, it could aggregate intent for both theaters and distributors.
"The movie studios have no idea who their customers are," Larkin says. "Only since Netflix are they starting to understand the power of data."
Next: MoviePal
MoviePal: Scan Movie Trailers Like You Would A Song
MoviePal's notion is similar to Watch It, but they add the sound-tagging touch. Much like Shazam, which is also creating entertainment databases, your iOS device can listen to a few seconds of a movie trailer and log that movie. The app, developed by YouWeb's Suneet Shah and Rohan Relan, not only lets you share your intent, and remind you when the movie is released, but it also finds the trailer online to share that as well.
"The primary medium by which movies are advertised is through trailers, broadcast in movie theaters and on television," says Peter Relan, YouWeb founder. "That is neither mobile nor very social."
Shah says that, like many other elements of social media, the user-generated aspect of MoviePal will be what makes it work best as an app.
"The movie buffs, the connectors, are the ones who are going to make movie trailers social," Shah says. "The ability to engage around this kind of media is something that hasn't happened yet."
Rohan Relan says the staff has worked hard on maximizing scanning speed, which is somewhat bolstered currently by a relatively small database of current trailers. That database will grow, however. Because trailers have a distinct advantage over any other form of first-release movie media, Peter Relan pointed out.
"It's in your home on the television, of course," Relan said. "But even in the movie theater, trailers are the last thing you watch before they ask you to turn off your phone."
Next: Fizziology
Fizziology: Box-Office Insights Via Social Media Buzz
Social TV metrics generally measure who's talking about shows before, during and after air-time. For movies, a metric that measures that first part -- before -- could do a world of good. Enter Fizziology, which predicts box-office take through analysis of social media sentiment.
"A lot of studio execs are seeing the value in measuring buzz around their movies in real-time and are able to use this data to make quick changes to marketing efforts, ad spend and trailer cuts," says Jen Handley, co-creator and COO of Fizziology. "We talk about social media as the world's biggest, fastest, most honest focus group and studios are definitely treating it that way."
Fizziology might be interesting to the movie buff, but it's really intended for movie executives. And some recent predictions have more of those execs paying attention:
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Actual opening weekend: $90.15M
Industry estimates: $110M (22% from actual)
Fizziology estimates: $95M (5% from actual)
Cowboys & Aliens
Actual opening weekend: $36.4M
Industry estimates: $45M (24% from actual)
Fizziology estimates: $34M (7% from actual)
Handley says the process goes beyond algorithms.
"It takes a real, live person to decipher subtleties in language like snark, sarcasm, slang or references to popular culture," she says. "We have a training process so our Social Media Analysts all understand what to look for and we have consistency in the way we grade sentiment."
And so Fizziology might know as much about that connection between the theater and social media as anyone. Turns out my theory about the built-in disconnect is a little off, Handley says.
"You'd be surprised at how much of the social buzz happens while someone is sitting in the theater watching the movie," she says. "We see a lot of feeds from people reacting to the first look at a trailer, and scenes and lines throughout the movie. And for those who don't post during the movie, they're posting immediately afterward."
Those are the kinds of credits Hollywood needs to see rolling more and more.
