If you follow comic book movies at all, you know doubt have heard the complete panning that is aimed at the new Fantastic 4 reboot. With Twitter firing-off at machine gun speed and an 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film is clearly in trouble. All this is reflected at the box office, where it raked in only the #2 spot on it’s opening weekend.
It’s a fascinating look at how movies make or break in the age of social media as the movie's story has been chronicled in blogs and tweets and how early reviews went viral in a way that infected the film to a fatal degree.
Which is why I think Fox should immediately release it to on-demand streams.
The only way to combat the on-slaught of opinion makers is for people to see it for themselves. But today’s high cost of cinema means that negative press will cause many people to sit this one out. It’s a “wait-and-see” approach to movie watching that many of us have adapted and it’s not going to change. As our home theater set-ups get better and cinemas get more expensive, the incentive to gamble $15 on a ticket for a movie getting panned in the press is going away.
Releasing it to on-demand services now means that many people who may not pay for a movie night out might spend the $5 on a streaming rental. If the movie has any merits, it may help sway the conversation or even convince a few to go see it in the larger screen. Worst-case, it doesn’t help at all and they’re right where they are now; at least with a few more early views on their hands.
But the really disappointing scenario would be to release it later and have opinions changed too late. It won’t matter if 6 months from now people say “it wasn’t as bad as we’d heard” because the mindset will be cemented and the sequels will have been canceled.
Of course, if the movie is as bad as it’s reviewed, none of this may matter much. But for now, there’s at least an interest that might have some fans (myself included) willing to give it go if we didn’t have to pay theater prices. I say, roll the dice, release on-demand, and see if you can capture every possible dollar now while the marketing mind-share is still fresh.
But that’s just my opinion...
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