Snakes on a Plane, a film with enormous web buzz behind it, debuts in theatres today. Soon we will know how big the box office score is for this Internet phenomenon. There have been over 50,000 blog posts on Technorati about Snakes on a Plane with blog posts recently spiking to nearly 3,000 per day. You can see the posts soaring on this graph from BlogPulse.com. BlogPulse also says Samuel L. Jackson was the fourth most-discussed person in the blogosphere for the day. Bloggers have also been discussing the unique send a phone message from Samual L. Jackson promotion that has been running. There are already nearly 1,500 links to the Varitalk promotion which generated 100,000 phone calls in the first 24 hours.
Our Watchers Watch sister site forecasts good numbers for the film. This is good for the Internet but it could be a bad thing if we are bombarded with ill-conceived sequels.
There is no competing horror movie opening this weekend, so Snakes on a Plane should do well. This will confirm what we already know -- that Internet buzz can truly boost a film's performance at the box office. The only downside of Snakes being a box office smash is that we may have to deal with all sorts of "Something on a Something" sequels. You know, Snakes on a Boat, Snakes on a Train, Snakes on Your Bike, Snakes on a Segway. And when they run out of Snakes titles, they could always go for the cute, with Kittens on a Plane. That sounds like a good holiday movie.
Not everyone likes the idea of deadly snakes being on an airplane -- some people will be too frightened to go! However, with all the Internet discussion this film has probably already found enough fans to be a hit.
