Can Tweets Kill a Movie ? An Empirical Evaluation of the Bruno Effect

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010. Atlanta, Georgia, USA ACM 978-1-60558-930-5/10/04. Abstract On Friday, July 10th 2009, the movie Bruno was number one at the box office and took in over $18.8 million in revenue. Based on this initial performance, analysts predicted the movie would rake in over $50 million in its opening weekend. By Saturday, however, the movie experienced an unusually sharp 38% decline in box office receipts. Several prominent journalists speculated that comments on the social media site Twitter.com may have amplified negative wordof-mouth about the movie and caused the dramatic fall-off in revenue. We investigate this “Bruno effect” and, contrary to popular accounts, find that neither positive nor negative comments on Twitter are associated with changes in box office performance. We do find suggestive evidence, however, that the volume of tweets, while not necessarily altering consumer behavior, may provide useful information for predicting opening weekend box office performance.