Cloverfield’s apparant lack of legs

So over this past weekend Cloverfield dropped from the top movie in the country, a position it held on its opening weekend, to fourth place. Box office receipts for the movie were down a ridiculous 68 percent from the previous week.

It’s tempting to latch on to the middling reviews that the movie received and say that this is another case of negative word of mouth that killed the advertising for a movie. But I actually don’t think that’s the case in this instance.

Instead I think that the campaign did exactly what it was designed to do – turn out audiences for opening weekend. And I think the vast majority of people who were at all interested in the movie were motivated to come out that weekend because of the mystery that surrounded the monster and other aspects of the movie. No one wanted to be the odd-person out in conversations with their friends and no one wanted to spend the next week or two avoiding spoilers so they got their butts into theater seats.

So if the campaign hadn’t been as energizing, especially as it relates to the mystery of the monster, this might have grossed $25 or $30 million its opening weekend and then seen a smaller drop-off in week two.

Did some negative word-of-mouth play into this? Of course. People seemed to be vaguely disappointed with the creature (an inevitable result of so much hype and speculation) or they thought the human characters were insufferable twits who deserved to be eaten (not understanding that they were likely designed that way for a purpose) or something like that. Whatever the specific reason, on some level it didn’t live up to the execution.

But a big part of the drop is that 70 percent of the people inclined to see the movie saw it that opening weekend. A movie will outgrow its natural audience and this was the size of that audience for Cloverfield. Like others before it, the hype created expectations of $80 million weekends and such, but those were largely the creations of fevered imaginations.

The Paramount/Bad Robot teams did a great job of creating a campaign that turned the audience into participants and got excitement levels up. That campaign worked as well as it was ever going to.