Movie companies blame instant messaging for box office flops

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk,
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality,
lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely
nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who
instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes
while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully
crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie
on its opening weekend.

"In the old days, there used to be a term,
'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax,
told the Los Angeles Times. "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."

But those days are over, because the
technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the
time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily
promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.

Five years ago, when summer movies were
arguably just as bad as they are now, the average audience drop-off
between a film's opening weekend and its second weekend was 40 per cent.
This summer, it has been 51 per cent. In some cases, the drop-off has
started between the film's opening on a Friday night and the main
screenings on Saturday. The upshot: unsuccessful films disappearing from
cinemas so fast that there is no time for second
opinions.