The modern age of the internet changed the way that people look at movies. Before the internet, movie discussion was much more confined. Movies gained traction through word of mouth, as people talked to the people who lived near them about what they thought was good or bad. The geographical friendships that people made based on who was around them at any given time. And, because people were limited on who they knew, interests didn’t always fall in the same area.
That changed with the internet. As it rose to prominence in the 1990s, movie forums, chat rooms, and such places grew. People who were interested in movies found these websites and frequented them. They discussed what they liked about certain movies, or looked for any bits and pieces of news about what was coming out. It was easier to find people who had similar interests. The beginning of the internet echo chamber had begun, though it wouldn’t be until social media that people could refine the content to only see what they wanted. Social media made it so that people could, if they wanted to, only see content that completely agreed with their perspective.
There were a few other sides of social media that, combined with the echo chamber effect, changed the way people watched movies. The first was that production news became much more accessible. People shared headlines on a frequent basis whenever anything was announced by anyone. The second was memes. Movies, trailers, celebrities… Social media users make memes out of anything. If they could make a joke out of something, they would. Everyone else would, too. The final thing social media brought to movie culture was blogs. There were blogs before places like Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook existed. But, much like news headlines, social media allowed more people to share their thoughts, their writing, and other people’s writing. This blog wouldn’t exist without that.
Each of those aspects of social media are relevant to how people perceive many of the movies they watch. Each one can be harmful in its own way. As much as people found people to share their interests with, people they wouldn’t have been able to find were they not connected by the internet, they also let in those three things that destroyed any realistic set of expectations that people could have for a movie. People go into a movie with too much baggage to truly appreciate what it is.
Movie news is the first step to the creation of any movie. Studios release little tidbits about their movie to get people excited. Casting is announced so that potential audiences know who will be in the movie. Movies are sold on star power Sometimes things go a little further than, with a list of people considered for leading roles before an announcement is made about who was cast. Some people will be disappointed in the casting choice, wanting someone else in the role. This could lead to a grass is greener situation where, when they finally see the finished movie, they think that their choice would have been better for the role. It’s an unfair comparison that doesn’t truly let a performance sit on its own.
Most superhero movies go through this sort of treatment. A list of actors in consideration will be announced for a movie, only for the list to be whittled down to the person who gets the role. Doctor Strange had a myriad of actors up for the part before Benedict Cumberbatch was chosen to play the superhero. Others, such as Joaquin Phoenix, Ewan McGregor, and Ethan Hawke were up for the title role. They each could have brought something else to the role, and they were each someone’s favourite choice to play the character. It went to Benedict Cumberbatch, though. Some people wouldn’t be able to get past the casting choice because of the announcement of who else was up for the part.
The other big piece of news that could cause people to think negatively of a movie involves pieces of the story becoming public knowledge. Spoilers are always a big issue when it comes to people’s enjoyment of a movie. The less they know about a movie, the more pleasantly surprised they will be when they finally see it. But between trailers, story leaks, and assholes on the internet who need to know and share everything about a movie before it gets released, it’s hard to go into a movie without a fully formed idea of what it will be.
To use another Benedict Cumberbatch movie, Star Trek Into Darkness had an issue with spoilers affecting how people went into the movie. When it was announced that there would be a second movie in the Kelvin timeline of Star Trek films, people automatically assumed that Khan was going to be the villain. J.J. Abrams and the Bad Robot people said that the villain wasn’t going to be Khan, and that Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing a new villain named John Harrison. Fans wouldn’t take that as true, however, and kept demanding that J.J. Abrams just say it was Khan. When Star Trek Into Darkness was released, John Harrison ended up being Khan. People didn’t even wait a day to jump on social media and scream out that they knew it was Khan all along. That speculation and subsequent spoiler ruined any surprise for people who wanted to go into the movie without any knowledge of what was going to happen.
Now that things are at the release stage of a film, and spoilers have been discussed, it’s time to bring up the idea of memes. Social media loves memes. People love to make jokes out of anything they can and drive those jokes into the ground. Movies and television are only one of the places that people get material for memes, but they are a big source of that material. Screenshots from a movie will be taken out of context and made into punchlines for likes on Twitter. Or for someone’s own amusement. It doesn’t always happen when are released.
The Snowman was a 2017 detective flick about Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender), a detective working alongside new transfer Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson) to solve a missing women case that turned into a series of murders. They determined that every time a woman was abducted and killed, there was a snowfall. There was also a snowman outside every location where someone was taken and/or murdered. Would they be able to solve the case before more people were attacked?
The Snowman garnered some overwhelmingly negative reviews upon its release. That was a little unfair to the film. It was a solid murder mystery, detective story with some good performances and a great setting. There were some issues with it. The name Harry Hole was laughable, and Val Kilmer gave an extremely odd performance as he was coming off throat cancer recovery. But, overall, it was a decent detective flick that got more hate than it deserved.
Much of the distaste for the film seemed to be in the way people came into it. Part of the movie involved a cat-and-mouse game between the killer and the detectives. The killer would leave notes for the detectives. One of the posters for The Snowman, released well before the movie hit theaters, featured one of the notes. It had a cartoon sketch of a snowman and the message “Mister Police, you could have saved her, I gave you all the clues.” That poster, specifically with the childish design of the note, became a meme. People made jokes about the movie when the poster got released. Then the movie came out. There was no way for people to not think of the movie as a joke along the lines of the memes they had made for weeks before. It only made sense for them to go into the movie with that mindset after social media had already declared the movie a joke.
Another 2017 movie that became a joke before its release was The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. When the trailer was released for the film, it was accidentally released without a lot of the audio. There were screams and a little bit of crashing, and that was it. People started to put their own audio into the trailer and release their own versions. People enjoyed doing that more than they enjoyed the trailer when it was released with proper audio. They enjoyed making the memes more than the movie because the movie had become the joke by the time it was released.
The final way that social media could harm a movie is through the constant blogging and reviewing of movies. Since the rise of social media, it has become much easier for people to share their opinions on everything. Through a blog, much like this one, someone can long form write about a movie and share that writing with other people. Through something like Twitter, a person could quickly spurt off some words about the movies they see. More people do this sort of stuff, leading to more discussion of movies, and more discussion of the same movies.
With the rise of the blog, specifically, more people were able to start their own film websites that they could share links to on social media. More film sites meant more reviews. More sites competed for people to read their reviews of the same movies, meaning that there were more reviews of the same movies. It also meant that more sites tried to get their critic credentials so that they could go to early screenings of things and get their writing out there before other sites and publications. The issue with this is that there could be a burnout about a movie before it gets released to general audiences.
This overabundance of reviews for the same movie becomes much more apparent during awards season. Many of the movies in contention for awards don’t get a general release before awards start being given out. They might screen in Los Angeles and New York to get their Academy qualification. They might play a few festivals. But when it comes time for awards, they’ll send out screeners to critics and voters to try and build some buzz. It’ll usually work. The critics will talk endlessly about the movies that they think could be in contention for the top awards. They will talk for months, from around the time of the Toronto International Film Festival in September until the Academy Awards in February or March. By the time general audiences can see the movies, they’ve experienced burnout and the movies can’t always live up to the expectations that were set by the people who saw them earlier and talked endlessly about them.
Social media changed the way that people interacted in their daily lives. It connected people from across the world who might not have otherwise ever talked to each other. It allowed people to share their opinions with the world, or whatever people across the world would read them, instead of simply talking to their buddies at the bar after a long day at work. Social media also allowed for an echo chamber effect, where many people would be talking about the same thing to an overwhelming extent.
When it came to movies, there were three major ways that social media helped fuel the discussion. People were able to easily get movie news well before a movie’s release, including casting, story leaks, and set photos. This meant that people could see the movie being made and judge it based on those components before it was finished and released. The second was that everyone would make jokes about the movie because the social media very much became a world of memes. This might cause people to think less of a movie before seeing it. Then there was the side of things where a movie got released to some people, or all people, and the discussion felt overwhelming. It could lead to exhaustion or burnout, thus affecting someone’s feelings about the movie. Social media could do all that and more.
Social media has been only one of many ways that the film world changed through the growth of the internet. It connected people in many ways that hadn’t existed before. It allowed them to see different sides of movies, as opposed to the trailers and films they saw in the theater or on television. Instead of talking to the relatives or friends from their hometown, people were able to meet others from around the world and connect on shared interests. The world grew. The film world grew. And things have never been the same since.
Now for a few notes:
- The Snowman brought Val Kilmer back to Sunday “Bad” Movies for the third time, following his work in 7 Below (week 137) and Delgo (week 148).
- Michael Fassbender made his second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance this week. His first was in Jonah Hex (week 249).
- Johnny Otto returned from American Ultra (week 261) to appear in The Snowman.
- Finally, Alec Newman was in both The Snowman and The Marine 6: Close Quarters (week 327).
- Have you seen The Snowman? What were your thoughts about the movie? How do you feel social media helped shape the film landscape? Let me know on Twitter or you can drop a comment and I’ll see it that way too.
- The comments and Twitter can also be used to leave suggestions about what movies I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. If there’s a movie that you think would fit into the Sunday “Bad” Movies repertoire, let me know. I always like to hear about movies I might not already know of.
- Head on over to Instagram to check out what Sunday “Bad” Movies has to offer. It’s some fun stuff, most of the time.
- And now it’s time to look forward to the next post. Sunday “Bad” Movies began with a Star Wars knock-off called Starcrash (week 1). I’m journeying back into that territory again with a movie that played off both Star Wars and Star Trek. You might not know what movie I’m talking about. I’ll be taking a look at 1980’s Galaxina for next week’s post. I hope you’ll join me for that one. It should be fun. See you then.
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