The company packed a screening at San Diego's Comicon with people who won access via Twitter. It also staged "the first ever Red Carpet Twitter meet-up" during the movie's premiere at Mann's Chinese in Hollywood, generating celebrity tweets including Sarah Silverman's "just made me smile forever" and Tony Hawk's "another Tarantino classic."
Twitter has broadened the reach of bloggers and other aspiring opinion-makers.
"Just two years ago, if I saw a movie I loved or I hated, I'd be able to tell a dozen friends, tops," says John Singh, who works for the movie and social networking Web site Flixster. "Now, I can be walking out of a theater as the credits are rolling and immediately tell 500 people what I thought. ... It's never been this easy to be this influential."
Bruno says that the savvy use of Twitter can build up a force that's sometimes just as powerful as "word of mouth": "want to see." Take "The Proposal," a film that had little advance buzz, yet has become one of the summer's most profitable productions. (It cost $40 million and is grossing upward of $159 million.) Flixster, which runs the Movies application for iPhones, worked with Disney/Touchstone to promote the Sandra Bullock-Ryan Reynolds romantic farce. Flixster's Singh credits the campaign with increasing the film's opening-weekend haul by 30 percent.
"Nothing else can get you the same mass of people all immediately saying how they felt about a movie 30 seconds after it ends," says James Lombardi of Baltimore, who sometimes uses Twitter to get a fix on a movie.
Positive reviews from her Twitter friends can persuade Wailes to attend a film if she's "undecided." If it "gets raves from people I network with, since I know I have something in common with these people, I figure there must be something in the movie that I might want to see." Since even the four-star professional reviews for "Up" sent mixed signals to her - was it a kids' film with a lot of adult scenes? a comedy with a lot of heartbreak? - she was on the fence about seeing it.
"But when I saw so many great reviews on Twitter, about both the silly elements and the heartfelt montage, they encouraged me to go."
Others see the Twitter Effect as more urban legend than viable trend. Gregg Kilday, film editor of the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter, notes that it's impossible to separate the factors that would explain a film's drop or rise in box office.
