Death by WOM
Did you see Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie "Bruno" yet? If not, you can probably save your money. That's the judgment of John Horn, movie critic and journalist for the LA Times, speaking on NPR's All Things Considered. Why? Because this movie may already have been killed by negative WOM. 
Before Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, word of mouth on a movie was slower. According to Horn, "even if they had a turkey, [studios] used to get two weeks of business before the stink really caught up to the film. Now they have 12 hours." Even though Cohen's previous movie Borat was a hit, so fans were eager to see Bruno, according to Horn "People came out of that movie and started texting or Twittering their friends and telling them not to go see it."
The result? Bruno opened on Friday night and by Saturday its box office take had fallen by an astounding and unprecedented 40%. Twelve hours? With the social networking that people do today, and the Twitter-speed connections that are possible, it would be interesting to see if data were available showing that the audience for Bruno trailed off during the evening of the day it was released. I wonder whether attendance in the Pacific Time Zone was measurably lower than Eastern Time Zone attendance levels, for instance.
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