“Feast” after “Snake’s on a Plane”: what went wrong, what will be done right?

 

 

 

Everybody is trying to figure out what went wrong with “Snakes on a Plane”. But does anyone whose talking about it really care? All those reviewers who have another clever way to say they hated it – they don’t care. But I do care. I care what happens at my local cineplex. That’s where I go to enjoy myself and as a continually budding filmmaker learn, even from mistakes. And there were a lot of mistakes made with “Snakes”. And it wasn’t the title. The title is the best thing to have happened with the movie. It brought on board Sam Jackson (an actor of repute) and it garnered more attention than it would have with any other title… it was a great marketing technique because it got people to talk about it. But the public cannot live on movie titles alone. Nor as we’ve seen in recent years big name stars.

So what went wrong? Even the Head of Distribution at New Line, David Tuckerman, stated that he was “disappointed” by the box office returns, given the amount of Internet buzz for the movie

And There was a lot of internet buzz, but that’s pretty much where the buzz stayed. I have no idea how many people went to the website and got caught up in the hoopla, but the “Snakes on a Plane” experience didn’t really take advantage of the medium. They didn’t create a true on-line experience, and I’ll come back to experience again later. There were comparisons made with the internet savvy team that did the marketing for “Blair Witch”. But the “Blair Witch” website brought more than 22million hits, because of the “is it real or not” scenario. But even more so, because the website was more haunting than the film itself. Now that creates an audience waiting to happen. SOAP got how many hits? Probably just as many as they would have without the aptly named title.