Got sent this beauty from one of the 'Mindshare Royalty' in NY.
Over at HP they were studying 3 million tweets for 25 movies and identified that the rate at which tweets were produced predicted the box office takings before the film opened.
Apparently, on the basis of tweets alone the research guys predicted that The Crazies would take $16.8m in its first weekend in the US. It actually took $16.06m.
The team forecast that romantic drama Dear John would take $30.71m in its first US weekend. It took $30.46m.
It doesn't come as a surprise that the quicker the word of mouth, the better the performance of the movie and now we can calibrate that word of mouth the impact on the movie business could be game changing.
It may be nit-picking but I think that Twitter would be pretty good at predicting the opening weekend of movie releases, first week sales of a cell phone etc but two things spring to mind:
1. Twitter is about opinions, so this approach works if there are breakouts or stinkers
2. Twitter is fickle - its not going to be so good at predicting the 'legs' of a movie as very quickly there will be another shiny object for the twitterati to focus on
