Twitter Box Office Update

2012 took in a very impressive $23.7 million for its opening Friday, the 6th largest November opening of all time, on its way to an estimated $61.5 million for the weekend. The figure was also the biggest opening ever for director Roland Emmerich, beating out Day After Tomorrow 's $23.5 million. Its Friday tweet ratio came in at 676, somewhat below my initial estimate of 800 which is an indication of it also bringing in significant older audiences outside of its core 18-35 demographic for the opening. This will be a great yardstick for future blockbuster type releases in the coming months also.

Another point of note is that this film also opened in 100+ markets today as did Michael Jackson's This Is It yet its ratio was way lower. There are a few reasons for this I can see, one is that This Is It opened on a Wednesday, which means it had midnight showings, and all Wednesday and Thursday for tweeters to discuss the film which would have greatly boasted its tally. Also, This Is It had much more media hype surrounding it, and Jackson himself was such a controversial figure which boosted its buzz.

Pirate Radio was pretty much dead on arrival, pulling in a paltry $882 thousand on its opening Friday for a ratio of 2,745. I had figured it would come in with a higher ratio than Amelia 's 1,574 but this was way above my initial thoughts. Focus Features had attempted to pitch the film to baby boomers nostalgic for 60s and 70s rock and position it as counter-programming for 2012 . But this high ratio indicates that it really didn't capture this older demographic and missed the mark significantly.

Below is the updated chart for my Twitter tracking history.

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.