Facebook Watch – Slow Week Sees ‘Minions’ Back On Top

It was a relatively slow week on Facebook as no new massive trailers or big news bounced around to push like totals, so everything was pretty much left up to good old fashioned organic growth. The leader of that pile ended up being everyone’s favourite little yellow weirdos the Minions. The film saw an additional 121,600 likes over the week, thanks mostly to residual buzz about its trailers a few weeks ago but also due to some Holiday-themes clips which were released. Yup, these guys are going to be absolutely massive next year on release.

Furious 7 and  Avengers: Age Of Ultron accounted for the second and third spots respectively over the past week. With such a huge base of likes its really not that hard to gain sizeable numbers of people a week. Its like osmosis for Facebook, big numbers attract people.

Perhaps more interestingly Woman In Black 2 has been seeing a nice push of late thanks to its marketing materials. Now if the recent film The Pyramid taught us anything its that big social media numbers for horrors are pretty standard and not necessarily indicative of box office fortunes. Woman In Black is reusing the Facebook page of the original so it had a big jump start which it is putting to good use it seems. I’m not convinced that its going to be able to match the $20 million opening of the original but the first weekend in January has proven in the recent past to be a gold mine for horrors. Each of the last three years has seen a horror open in that slot to success: Texas Chainsaw 3D, The Devil Inside and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones – all very profitable and successful films in their own right.

Exodus: Gods And Kings rounds out the top 5 as it is drawing nearer to its release date. While its 30% hike in numbers was very strong, its overall like total is really lacking when compared to Noah which had over 400k by this point. This might have to rely more on word of mouth and legs than an opening of $40 million like Noah did.