This movie was only made “famous” on the internet because of the BAD premise. I don’t plan on seeing it, and it only made me worry about Sam Jackson’s career.

This movie would have been a completely anonymous film that practially went straight to DVD if it wasn’t for the internet buzz. It would have made Ishtar look like Titanic without the buzz. Anyone who was expecting a b-grade airline disaster to become some massive cinematic event was deluding themselves.

There’s only one thing worse than refusing to learn from mistakes, and that’s learning the wrong thing from your mistakes. Internet hype did not hurt this movie in any way — it saved the movie from obscurity. There’s only so much you can polish a turd, and the truth is most people didn’t think “Snakes on a Plane” sounded very entertaining.

I went to see it opening night with a dozen friends, and the theater was packed with excited people. If we’d seen it without the energy in the room, we probably would have all walked out (truthfully, we never would have gone in the first place).

Internet excitement may or may not lead to success. Popularity is not easy to predict as we’d like. It’s just as fallacious to say that Hollywood should know that past failure proves future failure, as Hollywood is when it thinks that past success proves future success.

I do now agree to Edward’s SoaP/SERENITY association. Thanks Paul, for helping me read his post from a different angle.

I disagree, there. The Serenity movie came about not because the studio decided to listen to a loud group of fans, but because that loud group of fans was able to grab the studio’s attention with strong DVD sales… I expect someone tried to project how many movie tickets each DVD set represented. They overestimated.

Serenity had a lot of internet hype (mostly about free tickets for talking about Serenity online) but the lesson there says not to expect a TV series popular on DVD to easliy translate into box office gold.

And the lesson has been learned from Serenity. There’s been no Wonderfalls or Futurama theatrical film, despite strong DVD sales for those series (all Fox/Recency properties, IIRC). Futurama, instead, is following the path Family Guy sucessfully navigated.

I think part of the problem may be that people in the media really, really WANT to believe in all this “new media, web 2.0″ stuff for the same reason that people in comics really, really WANT to believe that the stuff we’re talking about is going to change the face of the world. But while the people using the Internet are (relatively) representative by this stage, the people talking loudest on it certainly aren’t.

And you also have another situation. The problem with the Internet-driven re-tool was simply that once we all read about it online, there was no reason to spend $10 to see it - we all knew what this movie was about from Day One - and even the internet people have got to, at some point, admit, that when they’re the ones in the driver’s seat, there are very few surprises. It’s like getting everything you had on your Christmas list - and nothing else. It happened to me once when I was 11, and I learned a valuable lesson - it was NOT all that and a bag of chips.

Gotta tell ya, when it feels like I could have written the movie I’m paying good money to see, it’s disappointing and I feel ripped off. It just gets too predictable when you put in all the fanboy comments ahead of time.

As for Serenity, with the way the Firefly and Serenity DVD’s continue to sell (currently #22 and #56 respectively on Amazon.com’s top DVD’s) and the way fanbase continues to expand, it seems the movie was made too soon (or released) too soon.

Oh, wait. Sometimes, one-size-fits-all logic does not fit all sizes.

BTW I loved Serenity, enjoyed some Star Trek movies, and don’t plan to see SoaP unless it hits 110 degrees here and I just want to get out of my non-A/C home and into an A/C-ed theatre.

-Steve!