"Even if you don't have Twitter, a lot of people, especially kids, have long had the ability to text each other, sometimes from within the theater," he says. "And for a lot of the mass-market movies, the potential audience will go whether friends tell them they're good or not. Universal did a great job of marketing 'Bruno' and getting awareness of a character who was not well-known, but they may have been trying to mass-market a figure that had no mass appeal."
Brandon Gray, president and founder of boxofficemojo.com, notes that, just a few months ago, the hit teen-romance vampire film "Twilight" dropped 41 percent from Friday to Saturday, without any discussion of the Twitter Effect.
"There have been many indications through the years that films targeting teens and young adults will have a huge Friday, and a more front-loaded weekend," Gray says. "That's just kind of how it goes."
Ira Miller, owner of the Rotunda Cinemas, says: "Even 'The Ugly Truth' opened bigger on Friday and then dropped."
Movietickets.com recently ran a home-page poll in which 88 percent of the voting sample said Twitter had no effect on them. Joel Cohen, the company's executive vice president and general manager, thinks "we may be putting too much weight onto the Twitter Effect. But you can see Twitter's benefits as a communications tool that spreads the word about a film, and the negatives have yet to be proven."
Cohen theorizes that Twitter may have a larger influence on the success of smaller films such as the hit documentary "Food, Inc." than it does on major studio releases. (Gray cautions that, compared with the money generated by studio features, the $3.6 million gross of "Food, Inc." is "just a drop in the bucket.")
Bowles, who distributed "Food, Inc.," acknowledges that "we did some Twitter-specific things, including a Twitter-cast with the movie's director, Robby Kenner." But he's cautious when it comes to describing Twitter as a "revolutionary" force.
"Revolutionize moviegoing? No. But all the tiny little bits together [Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and others] can add up to something meaningful."
