• by Tom Hespos , August 22, 2006

Well, our beloved Internet phenomenon, "Snakes on a Plane," earned a bit over $15 million on its opening weekend, barely edging out an equally silly movie where the guy who played Frank the Tank in that "Animal House" ripoff plays a race car driver.

Folks hyped "SoaP" on the Internet more than any film in history, and it makes a measly $15 million on its opening weekend? Most of the news articles I looked at Monday morning indicated that almost everybody expected more from the movie. So, what happened?

I'm sure the movie marketers will point to a variety of factors in their post-mortem, but I'd like to suggest that the "Snakes on a Plane" phenomenon quickly outgrew the movie and took on not just a life of its own, but a meaning of its own as well. I'd also posit that most of the folks hyping "Snakes on a Plane" online weren't hyping the movie itself, but the "SoaP" meme.

It wasn't long after the hype debuted that the movie's title began to take on several new meanings. "Snakes on a Plane" became a phrase that someone invoked as a synonym for "What you see is what you get," owing largely to the fact that the movie's title is probably the ultimate plot spoiler, leaving little to the imagination. The phrase also became somewhat of a symbol for the notion that Hollywood was truly out of original ideas.

Someone in marketing hoping for a big opening weekend might look at all the viral dialogue that ensued as free publicity. And it was, to a degree. But I think the difference between what happened with "SoaP" and free advertising is akin to the difference between a group of people laughing with you and people laughing at you.

For me, "Snakes on a Plane" jumped the proverbial shark when my business partner forwarded me a link to the SoaP/All Your Base hybrid viral video that made its rounds a while back. I was already sick of "SoaP" infiltrating just about every Internet forum and community I belonged to. The viral piece solidified it for me--the movie jumped the shark before it even opened. As much as I enjoyed Samuel L. Jackson's philosopher/hit man Jules in "Pulp Fiction," there was no way I was going to see "Snakes on a Plane."

If anyone thought that all this bloggy/viral juiciness guaranteed "Snakes on a Plane" runaway success on opening weekend, such expectations smack of the old-school thinking of "any publicity is good publicity." And we know how dead that line of reasoning is. In the end, marketers should be able to tell when people are showing enthusiasm for wanting to go see a film and when they're doing something else entirely, like making fun of how ridiculous its premise is.