Partisans of the Internet have been feeling their oats lately, taking credit for a senatorial primary victory, the firing of a Reuters photographer, and other events.  Still if the lackluster, second-place (some sources included the movie's $1.4 million Thursday night opening giving it first place, but it was second over the 3-day weekend) $13.8 million box office performance of the Net buzz film of all time, Snakes on a Plane, is an example of online marketing power, then perhaps the dawning of the new age has not yet arrived. 

 

A grassroots Internet campaign had provided Snakes on a Plane with more 'buzz' than any other of this summer's films (see 'Snakes on a Plane') -- and in an unprecedented move to appease the expectations of online fans of the project, the producers shot an additional five days of footage some six months after the principal photography had wrapped, incorporating suggestions from bloggers and getting the film's rating changed from 'PG-13' to 'R' in the process.

 

All of this pandering to would-be online cineastes apparently went for naught as Snakes came in at less than half of what several Hollywood box office analysts had predicted and well below the 'high teens' forecast by the traditional Hollywood tracking polls. 

 

The fate of Snakes merchandise such as the novelization from Games Workshop's Black Flame imprint and the DC Comics adaptation remains in doubt.  The size of a film's gross doesn't appear to much of a predictor of the performance of tie-in books -- the V for Vendetta film earned a little more than a third of Superman Returns' total at the box office, yet the V for Vendetta graphic novel has year-to-date bookstore sales of over 60,000 copies while DC's Superman Returns trade paperback has sold fewer than a thousand copies in the same venues. 

 

The key to the fate of Snakes merchandise may lie in how long the film can hang on in wide distribution (though it may be too much to expect Snakes to have 'legs'), especially since the first book in the two-issue DC Comics adaptation won't appear until two weeks after the film's premiere.  Fortunately for DC, Games Workshop and direct market retailers the predominantly male audience that Snakes on a Plane attracted is a good match for the typical comic shop customer profile.

 

During a typically mediocre late August weekend that Hollywood had hoped Snakes would energize, Talladega Nights remained number one for the third week in a row with a mere $14.1 million total, while Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest went over the $400 million mark (and will undoubtedly pass Spider-Man and become the sixth highest-grossing film of all time during the next week). 
 
Sony's Zoom, which is based on Jason Lethcoe's comic book, Zoom's Academy for the Super Gifted, dropped out of the top ten (to #12) in its second week of release.  The total for the top 12 films was down nearly 10% compared with the same weekend last year.