Why Did Snakes on a Plane Fail?

My friend Scott asked an excellent question that I forgot to address in yesterday's post about Snakes on a Plane.  While I sliced and diced how poorly it did, I failed to give enough reasons why it failed.

One way to go here, is to shrug your shoulders and say, "who knows?"  William Goldman knows that "nobody knows anything" when it comes to Hollywood, and smarter people than me can't predict why a film is going to succeed or fail.  Looking at a situation in hindsight, however, is different.

First, I'll let some others talk. 

• David Poland wrote a detailed piece blaming anything from the genre, to the audience, to the title, to Sam Jackson, to the timing, to critics, to the mainstream media, to New Line's publicity and marketing itself.  He also says the movie isn't half bad, by the way.
• The editors of Box Office Prophets always do a good Monday Morning Quarterback conversation each week, and they give their thoughts on SOAP.  Oversaturation is one notion, but then they also discuss how they didn't see any TV ads... frankly, they're stunned.

To me, I truly believe that the title was the worst double-edged sword you could possibly imagine.  It's brilliant, but fraught with problems.  Many years ago, when people said that Speed was Die Hard on a Boat, that mode of thinking slowly ingrained itself into our society.  This film cut out the middle man.  Forget calling it Fright Flight or Red Eye (which did better than SOAP) some other nonsense (Pacific Air Flight 121).  Go to the most reductive title you can think of to tell people what the movie is: Snakes on a Plane.

Now, once you've gone there and named the film something like that, you're going to divide up audiences in two ways.  First, Poland says it clearly that there's no doubt what the movie is, and there are people that like movies about snakes on planes, and people that don't.  And for people that don't, the title is so blunt, there's no doubt, no question, no ambiguity about what's going to be in this movie, so they are not coming.

But let me also throw this at you.  Don't you absolutely hate it when you see a trailer for a movie, and it tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the film?  Turns you off, doesn't it?  You probably won't go see that movie.  Well, now we have a film that did that very thing just by the title alone.  Boom.  End of story.

Again, had they changed the title to something else, well, we're not having this conversation (or any of the SOAP conversations of the past year), and instead you've got something like Stay Alive with Frankie Muniz instead of Sam Jackson.

Next, you might say that the title is part of the fun, it's a joke.  It's why Samuel L. Jackson signed onto the darned thing.  Yes, absolutely.  BUT... how many people do you really, honestly, understood that it was a joke?  (Well, all of us on the Internet did, but let me get to that later.) And of those people who got the joke, who wanted to see a knowingly campy movie about snakes on planes? 

I don't want to speak for everyone, but when I saw the trailer with an audience, they didn't laugh at the title.  Instead, they took it seriously, and thought it was stupid - you could hear the air coming out of the balloon.  It was one of those, "are you kidding me?" sort of responses.  The meta "we're really laughing at ourselves and how silly the title is" didn't come across, and the majority of people in this country are not going to get it anyway... not the people who go see Click ($135 million) or Scary Movie 4 ($90 million).

And that leads to my last point.  The thing that was also so loudly heralded about Snakes on a Plane was how they embraced the Internet, listened to the blogosphere, even so much that they added scenes to the film based on "our" feedback.  Well, guess what this awful opening showed us?

We just do not matter... at least yet.

The blogosphere is still one giant echo chamber with each of us linking to one another in a giant circle-jerk.  We get all whipped up into a frenzy about wikis and digg.com and ruby on rails and ajax... please.  We need to get over ourselves and our self-importance.  This is an amazing way to share ideas, to communicate with friends and family, to reach a small subset of the population, but... enough.  Probably not the best place to test market movie marketing campaigns costing tens of millions of dollars.

Oh yeah, and by the time the film came out, the bloggers were tired of it and couldn't care less.  When people are used to getting results immediately (Results 1 - 10 of about 33,000,000 for snakes on a plane. (0.10 seconds)), having discussions of the film languish on the web month after month made it seem like old news.  This isn't Hollywood's fault, mind you. It's just the difference between Hollywood time and Internet time.

By the way, Box Office Mojo is reporting that Talladega Nights beat Snakes on a Plane yesterday, so a film that has been out for 19 days (three weekends) beat a film that has been out for 5 days.  Nice.

But, to end on a hilarious note, here is Defamer's take on the situation:

Late last night, our cellphone rang, and we listened somberly as the weary, disappointed pre-recorded voice of Samuel L. Jackson arrived to deliver another promotional greeting: "Hello, BLOGGER. Pardon me if my memory is bad, but didn't I remind you last week to put down the BLOGGING MACHINE, step away from your BLOG, and make some time to go see my new movie, Snakes on a Plane? Where the fuck were you? Do you have any idea how motherfucking silly it feels sitting in this recording booth, reading from a list of hundreds of names and occupations just so you can feel like this message was meant just for you? And then you don't even go see my new movie, Snakes on a Plane? Fifteen motherfucking million? Fuck you, motherfuckers. I'm done with you. See you in motherfucking hell."

Apologies for how long this post is.  I'm liking Windows Live Writer so much, that my posts are growing beyond my control...

Comments

[Grant]

Greatest movie titles of all time. I didn't really sit down and do research but these were the five movies that popped into my mind when I thought of great movie titles. I would like feedback but I don't think anybody can come up with a better title then #1.

#1 Star Wars
#2 Dirty Dancing
#3 Death Race 2000
#4 Snakes on a Plane
#5 Sex, Lies, and Videotape

[Craig Beilinson]

Great list Grant.

Did you know that the original title for Star Wars was "Adventures of the Starkiller"? I think they made a wise move.

Other excellent titles to me are:
Seven
The Usual Suspects
Pulp Fiction
Reservoir Dogs
Edward Scissorhands

Worst title ever: The Shawshank Redemption. I believe the title alone cost this film a few Oscars...

[Grant]

One more title that just came to my mind. how could we forget "THe Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"? Absolutely classic. I would have to say that the worst movie title ever is actually one of my favorite movies "A Christmas Story" I'm having trouble coming up with more bad titles at the moment... probably cause that's the point of bad movie titles... They're forgetable.

[Grant]

I think the worst thing about Snakes on A Plane bombing is that I was looking forward to seeing how inventive they could get with the titles of the sequels... Snakes on a Boat, Snakes on a Train, Snakes on a Space Shuttle... and of course the porno version, Trouser Snakes on a Plane