Twitter Futures – ‘Paper Towns’ Surges Thanks To First Trailer

Sunday Morning Update: With the reign of Insurgent finally over a newcomer made its way into the top 5 for the first time this past week, shooting right to the top with its first trailer – Paper Towns. The latest film adaptation from author John Green’s (of Fault In Our Stars fame) list of best-sellers. Paper Towns had an eye-popping 122,864 tweets on Thursday, making it the third largest trailer of the year on Twitter behind only Unfriended and Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The main comparison here of interest is Fault In Our Stars which managed an even bigger 145,233 tweets last January. Given the fact that Paper Towns has a much bigger scope on it because of Stars I’m going to go out on a limp here and say $50 million+ is highly unlikely (Fault In Our Stars opened to $48 million), however, its still going to be a massive success with $30 million+ very likely at this point. I’ll be interested to see how its buzz tracks now that its first trailer is out and Fault In Our Stars continued to have huge volumes for months leading up to its release, enough to make it the most talked about film on Twitter for all of 2014.

The other big mover on the week was Insidious Chapter III which rose to just over 23,000 tweets last Wednesday after the release of its first trailer. By comparison, Insidious Chapter II had 36k+ tweets for its first trailer back in 2013, on its way to a $40 million opening. It would appear as though we need to lower our sights for the film given these trailer numbers, and with the horror genre being so busy this year this could be one that falls through the cracks when it comes to opening weekend. The first film opened to $10 million, second was $40 million and my guess is the third will land somewhere in-between.