LA Times article on how SMS and other forms of mobile messaging are impacting opening weekend box office receipts for movies that suck:
Fatima Bholat stepped into the summer sunshine, fresh from the darkened theater where she’d just seen “The Hulk.” It was opening day, and the 16-year-old high school junior had rushed out with her younger brother to see director Ang Lee’s moody take on the big green superhero. Now she wanted to tell her friends all about it. She whipped out her silver-and-blue T-Mobile cell phone, pressed a button and did something that strikes terror into the hearts of studio executives: She tapped out a message telling her friends exactly what she thought of the movie — and the verdict was brutal.
Fatima’s pan was all her friends needed to convince them to stay away. And they told their friends. Soon the chatter would end up in a girls Internet discussion group, where all the world could see what a few teenagers in Manhattan Beach thought about a movie. Word of mouth — buzz — has long been an element in a film’s success or failure. But rapid advances in technology, in the hands of an “American Idol” culture quick to express its vote-’em-off sentiments, has accelerated the pace of communication so much that Hollywood feels the reverberations at the box office almost immediately.
“In the old days, there used to be a term, ‘buying your gross,’ ” said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend. “You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience,” he said. “Those days are over. Today, there is no fooling the public.”