are<\/em> they thinking?)<\/p>\nThe film predicted by Variety<\/em> to win the weekend,, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause <\/em>came in a respectable second on 3,458 screens, averaged $5,640 and totaled $19,504,038. Flushed Away <\/em>was not far behind, on 3,707 screen, averaging $5,075 and totaling $18,814,323. It seems fairly obvious that the two family-oriented films split that audience, while the considerable non-family-oriented audience had one obvious choice.<\/p>\nThis film was hyped to an extent that few $18 million movies are. A clip was posted on YouTube shortly before the release, as the EW<\/em> article points out, and chat, photos, and reviews filled the internet. EW<\/em>\u2019s question was this: Would Borat<\/em> suffer the fate of Snakes on a Plane<\/em>? That film caused huge amounts of buzz in cyberspace but reaped somewhat disappointing ticket sales for a horror-thriller. The film\u2019s worldwide box-office, $59,377,419 on a reported budget of $33 million, wasn\u2019t great, but it wasn\u2019t disastrous, either. I suspect DVD sales will be much higher and put the film in the black.<\/p>\nThe semi-failure of Snakes<\/em> has led to speculation, as in EW<\/em>\u2019s article, that maybe the internet isn\u2019t as powerful a means of publicizing films as the studios hoped. Borat<\/em>\u2019s success demonstrates that we just plain don\u2019t know yet. Probably in some cases, yes, in some cases, no\u2014just as with other forms of publicity. EW<\/em> assigns grades to films\u2019 trailers. Maybe someday they\u2019ll do the same for internet campaigns.<\/p>\nSure, Borat<\/em> was all over the internet, but it was also all over the other media. You had to be living in a lighthouse on Easter Island if you wanted to miss all the PR. Sasha Baron Cohen himself was everywhere, including the sidewalk in front of the White House, promoting the film. He wisely appeared as Borat rather than as himself, giving people beyond his relatively small existing fan base a vivid hint of what they could expect from the film. The hype fed upon itself as the regular print and broadcast media began to treat the film as news precisely because it was becoming ubiquitous\u2014and because the colorful Cohen\/Borat made for great infotainment.<\/p>\nEven as I was drafting this entry, boxofficemojo.com posted the estimates for the Friday-night box-office figures. Not surprisingly, the top three films of last weekend look set to become the top three films of this weekend. Borat<\/em>\u2019s percentage of drop between weekends will probably be pretty low, a sign of a film with good word-of-mouth in addition to hype. \u201cBorat on a Plane?\u201d EW<\/em> asks. Clearly not.<\/p>\nI\u2019m interested in the relationship between online interest and the success of films. When I say \u201conline interest,\u201d I mostly mean the many fan-created sites and chatroom discussion that range far beyond a studio\u2019s own campaign in cyberspace. In The Frodo Franchise<\/em>, I\u2019ve got two chapters on the relationship of The Lord of the Rings<\/em> to the online publicity, from official to highly unofficial. There the internet clearly made a difference and boosted the film\u2019s success, for a variety of reasons. But for other films without a built-in fan base that break out and generate widespread interest in cyberspace\u2014The Blair Witch Project<\/em> being the most obvious exception\u2014the case is not so clear.<\/p>\nThe contrasting cases of Borat<\/em> and Snakes on a Plane <\/em>are fascinating, and I\u2019m planning to write more about the subject when the DVD of the latter<\/a> comes out on January 2 (complete with a \u201cSnakes on a Blog\u201d supplement). I\u2019ll explore why the two met such different fates despite the apparent similarity of the build-up on the internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kristin here– For some reason, the November 10 issue of Entertainment Weekly ran a story right up front in their \u201cNewsnotes\u201d section as to whether Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan would be a success based on its internet hype. By the time the magazine showed up in our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,40,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-industry","category-hollywood-the-business","category-the-frodo-franchise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9012,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/9012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}