It was a busy week for major trailers as five notable upcoming wide release chose to share new trailers with the world. The most notable of these was Furious 7 (aka Fast & Furious 7) which had its first trailer grab a huge 172,059 tweets and see a 1 million like increase on Facebook. The Twitter number was third best all time behind 50 Shades Of Grey and the recent Avengers: Age Of Ultron. It continues to be the biggest franchise on Facebook ever and its 1 million like increase over the last week has been a record there. I don’t think its a stretch to say that this should be the biggest opener of the franchise to date.
The Despicable Me spinoff entitled Minions dropped its first trailer late in the day yesterday where it grabbed 24,723 tweets. Today it has already zoomed past 44,000 and has its eyes set on 50,000+ perhaps. Very strong early showing for the film which spells bright things for its potential. The is miles ahead of the first trailers for the first two Despicable Me‘s (both were under 10,000 tweets) which shows both how much more popular the franchise has become and how great the appeal of the Minions are. Another good comparison here is Penguins Of Madagascar which is also attempting a spin-off from the main source of comic relief for a popular animated franchise. However, they could only muster up 3,200+ tweets for their first trailer. Facebook has been ridiculously active as well, with it already having more than 25 million likes. To put that in perspective, the Despicable Me franchise page has ‘only’ ~18 million likes. Minions looks to be box office gold in waiting.
Annie released its final trailer yesterday as well but unlike Minions it was to little fanfare as it didn’t crack 1,200 tweets. It is true that its title is very common so a restrictive search string has been employed on Twitter but that doesn’t affect its official Facebook page, and that saw less than a 1% bump. Being a very family friendly film it is skating under the social media radar somewhat which is to be expected I suppose, but it also seems to indicate that its not going to be having much of an impact outside of that core demographic which should limit its overall potential.
McFarland, USA released its first trailer yesterday where it nabbed just 1,296 tweets and its official Facebook page just barely got off the ground with 156 likes. Nothing to see here yet, and although Costner has a great track record in the sports genre this is going to need some help from word of mouth and critics to be anything more than another Million Dollar Arm (which had a very similar 1,332 tweets from its first trailer).
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water released its first full trailer last week to the tune of 3,486 tweets, a far cry from the 20k+ that the first nabbed but drops are always to be expected between its first two trailer offerings. Still, I must say that its numbers overall have been hardly eye-opening and I can’t help but feel as though the franchise might be past its peak.
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