Sonic and SpongeBob Challenge Skywalker for Social Media Dominance

While Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker continued to dominate social media this past week, new trailers for The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On The Run and Sonic the Hedgehog had saw those films featuring prominently across all tracked services. 

The main impetus for Rise Of Skywalker’ssecond-week social media success was the debut of Disney Plus’ “The Mandalorian,” which has proven to be an excellent driver of interest for the theatrical franchise. New episodes will continue to come out on Fridays at midnight, which will only help the overall buzz leading to The Rise of Skywalker’s December 20 release. “The Mandalorian” has its finale a week later and will benefit itself from the enthusiasm of the millions of fans fresh off seeing the series’s latest theatrical entry. This is a masterstroke of timing for Disney and no doubt a trial run for how it can use its new streaming service to promote its blue chip stocks and snowball interest between theatrical and streaming services.

SpongeBob is always a star on social media, and as such it was hardly a surprise to see the new doing so well based on the release of a new trailer. Sonic was the feel-good story of the week, as a redesigned model for the main character was widely praised. A first look at the film a few months ago left many fans creeped out by Sonic’s original design, which many thought was too realistic and not true enough to the roots of the beloved video game character. It remains to be seen whether the money spent on the redesign was a good investment, but the film has at this point accumulated a fair amount of goodwill.  

Twitter

Top 3 Posts:

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker led all films on Twitter this past week in terms of likes and retweets, with 114,426 likes and 17,727 retweets. The week’s top post belonged to Taylor Swift alerting fans to the debut of her song “Beautiful Ghosts” from Cats.

Facebook

Top 3 Posts:

Sonic the Hedgehog proved to be the only film able to beat Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker this week, as its 94,692 likes and massive 101,179 shares led both categories. It also secured the most successful single post of the week with its trailer debut, earning a power ranking of 8.8. SpongeBob settled for a solid third place in terms of total likes with 39,335, while its share tally of 27,551 was second best on the week, causing its overall power ranking to move past Star Wars.

Instagram

Top 3 Posts:

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker had one of its most commanding weeks ever on Instagram with 1,631,889 likes, handily besting last week’s total by 300,000-plus. News from the film franchise combined with the aforementioned debut of “The Mandalorian” combined to create a perfect storm on Instagram, where it remains one of most prominent film franchises.