Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

A lot has been made recently about Snakes on a Plane‘s failure to live up to the hype after if took only $15 million dollars at its opening. Mainstream audiences simply didn’t see the appeal. I’m an example of one such consumer who simply couldn’t be bothered with it, despite every blog post, video snippet and mashup that I’ve seen online.

There are those that say that the SoaP hype is the future of film marketing and there are others who say that its box offices returns so far are proof of the exact opposite. So where do I sit? Pretty much in the middle.

First off, the Snakes on a Plane hype can’t be artificially repeated. The seeds of the hysteria took off because it’s such a hair-brained plot that you can’t help but laugh at it. In fairness the movie makers caught on early enough and let the bloggers take the ball and run with it. Other film makers have started video blogs, trailer mashup contests, etc, but we won’t see fans embrace other movies in the same way as they did with Snakes on a Plane that often again.

That said there are some lessons to be learned from the SoaP phenomenon. Its relative marketing spend paled in comparison to other movies that earned a similar amount. So the hype certainly paid off in terms of the movie’s bottom line.

However the reason why I think that the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon will win out in the end is because of how the economics of the movie industry is changing. John Naughton points me in the way of this interesting snippet:

Once upon a time—two generations ago—the movie business was about making movies. Nowadays, it is about creating intellectual property that can be licensed in a raft of different markets. The Hollywood studios still make movies, of course, but by 2005, only 14.2 percent of their revenues came from movie ticket sales, while 85.8 percent came from licensing or selling their products for use in the home. (Click here for the studio revenue numbers.) Until 2005, the studio’s principal access to the home market came through pay TV, free television, video rentals, and DVD sales. But now, with products such as Apple’s video iPod and TiVo-type digital recorders becoming widely available, Hollywood is inching toward an even more lucrative way of exploiting the home market…

It’s that 85.8% is where I think Snakes on a Plane will make its money. For example, did you know that the first Austin Powers movie wasn’t that much of a success at the box office. However it generated huge word-of-mouth across US college campuses as copies of the DVD went from frat house to frat house. That hype led to the sequel. Shockingly enough, one of my favourite movies, Fight Club, didn’t make as much as hoped in the cinema, but its DVD sales were great.

Box offices returns typically half week on week, so let’s say Snakes on a Plane makes around $30 million from cinema screen. It’s SoaP’s cult following that tells me that it could go someway to getting a good chunk of that other 85.8%…or $170 million approximately. If not, at least the RIAA will a poster boy to say how downloading is killing the movie industry.

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