Twitter Box Office Update

Total tweets for November 20th Openers

The Twilight Saga: New Moon just blew me away today by picking up 142,786 tweets, a 97.13% hike from Wednesday's "paltry" 72,431. That's just staggering. By 8PM EST it was raking in close to 1,000 tweets every 5 minutes. It occupied two of the biggest trending topics of Twitter which was no surprised and simply dwarfed everything again, and not just movies but all news. As an interesting yardstick, it was announced that Oprah would be canceling her show in September 2011, and when that news broke it was still generating less than half the tweet traffic of Twilight and then subsided. From 8PM EST to 12AM EST New Moon managed a staggering 70,000 tweets. There is simply no comparison for this film and might not be again until part trois picks up where this left off new summer. As for predictions, based on the rampant tweets and passion i'm going to raise my expected ratio to 6,000 which will give it a $62.5 million opening day (including midnights) and a ~$110 million weekend.

Planet 51 had a decent Thursday bump to 616 tweets, up 78.03% from Wednesday's 363 tweets. That puts it at 1,491 tweets for the week, which makes it the lowest tweet total of any film since i've been formally tracking Twitter since September. Not a huge surprise considering its target market of young kids. Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs managed to pull in 2,282 tweets in its opening week and got a 282 ratio from an $8.1 million Friday. I think the ratio here is going to be slightly higher with about 400, which should give it around a $3.75 million weekend and $12.8 million for the weekend.

Lastly comes Sandra Bullock's The Blind Side which secured 1,116 tweets on Thursday for a 13.88% increase from Wednesday's 980. It secured 3,544 tweets for the Monday to Thursday period. Best comparison I have since September would be Love Happens which managed 1,822 tweets for a 592 ratio and this should appeal to a similar audience. My estimate of a 650 final ratio should give it around $5.45 million on Friday and $14.5 million for the weekend.

Check back tomorrow to see how the midnight screenings went and what that might mean for its weekend potential.

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.