Negative reviews on Twitter may have hurt movie’s box-office draw
Brüno is no Borat, and that includes its take at the box-office. Though Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film was a smash success on Friday, its grosses dropped by 40% between then and Saturday. The movie still won the weekend, but it didn’t live up to the expectations of the studio, Universal, which paid $45 million for the right to distribute it. Some observers think that Twitter may be to blame: reviews of Brüno on the social-networking site were mostly negative, warning other users that it wasn’t as good as Borat and telling them to stay away. It used to be that negative word-of-mouth took a while to spread, allowing a movie to have a great opening weekend before people realized they didn’t like it. Today, a movie can be sunk within 24 hours by something even worse than word-of-mouth: word-of-tweet.