As reported by the Hollywood Reporter Risky Biz blog, the critics are killing Pirates of the Caribbeans 2.
In a world where bad word-of-mouth can kill any movie, and text messages can do it faster than ever, the question is: what damage can bad critics do to a movie as expected as Pirates 2?
Let’s face it, everyone you know has been dying to see the movie since its release was announced. Even I was beginning to be convinced to go see the film, although I am not a big fan of this type of big-budget-cheezy-family-Disney-adventure-movie-with-pirates-and-ghosts-animated-by-computers. Yesterday again, I was reading that the movie would beat Spiderman 2 (and even the fake opening of Aquaman) on its opening week-end.
As an experiment, I am going to use this week-end a very smart tool developped by Opinmind, which crawls as many blogs as possible and, using text mining techniques, determines the relative number of positive and negative opinions. If that tool works, and if the movie is as bad as critics say it is, I expect the percentage of positive opinions to decrease drastically over the weekend.
Today Friday at 6pm PST, 97% of bloggers have a good opinion of Pirates 2:
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Bloggers like: "Pirates of the Caribbean 2" |
| 98%(+) | opinmind.com |
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Bloggers like: "Pirates 2" |
| 97%(+) | opinmind.com |
I will update that number over the week-end to see if my assumptions are correct. And on Sunday night, we will know if/how critics have an impact on word-of-mouth, and if/how this can quickly affect the opening week-endd box-office…
As the industry is only recovering I can’t wait to see if movie execs were right to count on a selfish self-centered evil jerk to save their business…
Update Saturday 4pm:
Out of 692 blogs analyzed, there is still 97% of good opinions.
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Bloggers like: "pirates 2" |
| 97%(+) | opinmind.com |
Update Sunday 7pm:
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Pirates 2 just topped the weekend opening boxoffice record with an impressive $132 million!
It seems that the bad reviews have not affected the anticipated hit. Have they affected viewers’ opinions and (online) word-of-mouth?
According to Blogpulse, Pirates 2 has generated an impressive buzz, especially compared to Superman 2:
I am not familiar with the methodology used by Blogpulse, but they have recorded 50,000 posts when Technorati recorded 5,0000.
Posts that contain "pirates 2" per day for the last 30 days.
Out of 1,000 blogs analyzed, opinions are still very positive for the movie: 96%
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Bloggers like: "pirates 2" |
| 96%(+) | opinmind.com |
Conclusion: the release of Pirates 2 has generated an immense online buzz. If we believe Opinmind, there has been no connection between the critics’ opinions and the viewers’ opinions, so the strong buzz has played in favor of the movie. Of course, an exit poll would probably do a better job at analyzing what viewers really thought about the movie, but at least, bloggers who decided to express themselves online, are spreading a very strong and positive word-of-mouth. Is it that people don’t care about the critics, or that they didn’t have the time to read them (in which case, Disney’s strategy not to organize early screenings paid off this time). A lot of questions that need to remain answered. In the meantime, Aquaman’s record didn’t last long…
Tags: pirates, pirates 2, opinmind, boxoffice, critics, buzz, wom, word of mouth, insights 2.0, insights2.0
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