Twitter is lying to you about what people watch, and I’m going to prove it to you.
That’s it. That’s the tweet. Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory,
the show that won’t make you pay eight dollars for a fake blue checkmark. Pop quiz Theorists:
What’s the most watched show on television right now? Go on down into the comments,
make yourself a guess. And when I reveal the answer later this episode, go and give that
comment an edit to let me know if you were right. No shame in wrong answers by the way,
because let me tell you, I did not know. If you had given me ten guesses, I would have never
gotten it. I had never heard of this thing before, but apparently it has sequels and spinoffs,
and NO ONE on the team has ever watched a fraction of a single episode. Anyway, I’ll give you the
answer later in this episode because that’s where the story ends. Here’s where it begins
"So what does her heartbeat sound like? Mighty."
Did you guys see the new trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water? I did,
but again, that’s because it’s my job to try and stay on top of these things. Without that,
I honestly doubt I would have. I have not heard anyone talking about this movie online. And that
immediately interested me considering this is the sequel to literally the highest grossing film of
all time. In case you weren’t around or paying attention 13 years ago when it came out in 2009,
Avatar was a HUGE deal. It was James Cameron’s first movie since his previous
highest-grossing film of all time: Titanic.
"I'm the king of the world!"
Not the most humble guy that one. I wonder
if I could get him to overpay for a social media platform that’s hemorrhaging money like an open
wound… Anyway, Avatar was basically Pocahontas meets the Blue Man Group in space. And yet,
despite the only significant challenge to this film’s status as “highest grossing film of all
time” coming in the form of the biggest crossover in cinematic history, I haven’t seen a peep about
its sequel over on Twitter. In fact, it’s trended only twice this year, which is the same number of
times that I trended, and ah, not to undersell myself or anything but let’s be honest, I am not
the sequel to the biggest movie in history that made $2.9 billion at the box office. For context,
it’d only take about 14.6 Avatars to pay for Twitter. A solid conversion rate to be sure.
And this sequel is coming out…IN DECEMBER? Hold on, that soon? Seriously, what is going on here?
Because my analytics brain knew that Avatar did super well, the lack of Twitter chatter actually
made me curious enough to look deeper into it. Maybe people just don’t care about this movie.
But no, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Avatar 2 has been tracking super well.
According to The Quorum, a website that compiles pre-release film data, The Way of Water has been
tracking consistently high in awareness, interest, whether people will actually pay to see it,
and if they’ll see it in theaters. Basically, a ton of people already know about Avatar 2 and they
are willing to pay to see it on the big screen. In fact, Avatar 2 has been ahead of Black Panther:
Wakanda Forever for the entirety of the year, only falling into second place the week that Black Panther 2
came out. All of this while the marketing for the movie has barely gotten beyond a trailer
or two. Honestly, looking at these numbers had me baffled. Was the tracking data just wrong? Turns
out, no. In truth, what goes viral online isn’t necessarily what’s actually popular. And the worst
culprit perpetuating all of this is Twitter. What is talked about on Twitter is not reflective of
what people are actually talking about out in the real world. If you actually look at the numbers,
Twitter is borderline lying to you about what people actually care about in their TV
and film media, and I’m about to prove it to you. To start things off here, let’s put some things
into perspective. We forget just how small a platform Twitter actually is. In 2022, it’s
estimated that Twitter has 396.5 million users. If we’re unrealistically generous to Twitter and
assume that none of them are bots or people with multiple accounts, that means just about 5% of the
world’s population has a twitter account. It's not too shabby, don’t get me wrong. But, for
comparison's sake, let's just put that up against YouTube. YouTube has an estimated 2.6 billion
monthly active users, and if we again assume there are no bots or users with multiple accounts,
that means that just under a THIRD of the world’s population uses YouTube every month. Twitter's
396.5 Million figure is their entire userbase, not just the people who are using it at least once a
month. And believe it or not, YouTube isn’t even the biggest fish in this sea; other social media
is just as huge, if not bigger. TikTok has itself an estimated 1 billion monthly active
users. Instagram has 1.4 billion, and Facebook has an insane 2.9 billion. Heck, even Pinterest and
Reddit are bigger than Twitter, with 480 million and 430 million monthly active users respectively.
What’s more, a study from November of 2021 found that just 25% of Twitter’s userbase generates 97%
of the website's content. That translates to fewer than 100 million people dictating almost all the
conversation on Twitter, and those voices are massively overrepresented by journalists and
media personalities who use Twitter to source and break news. I mean, just how many articles have
you seen claiming that “PEOPLE ARE FURIOUS ABOUT THING”, and then you click on it and all they’re doing
is citing random tweets from random accounts. No actual facts or trends or data, just the opinion
of a very small slice of one or two random tweets. What’s more, what users actually see on twitter
is very tailored to their own interests. Just like a lot of Social Media, Twitter’s algorithms
create echo chambers that only show you the things you actively engage with. So, while you might
think you’re getting shown a bunch of new and different ideas and topics all the time, you’re
actually just getting fed things that Twitter thinks that you’re gonna like and follow. For example,
if you’re really into the MCU, you’re going to get served a lot of MCU content in your browsing… and
also a lot of Guilty Gear. Twitter really thinks I’m going to be into Guilty Gear for some reason.
And the thing is, that vocal minority on Twitter is driving a lot of the decision-making that’s
happening in and around Hollywood. Sometimes the changes are for the better, like when Sonic the
Hedgehog’s design got completely overhauled thanks to the social media backlash against
Ugly Sonic. But, sometimes they’re for the worse. Like when Star Wars crumbled under the social
media pressure brought upon by The Last Jedi to make the confusing, unfocused and apologetic mess that
was The Rise of Skywalker. And we’re not just talking about the decisions inside the movies
themselves that are being affected by online discourse, but what gets greenlit in the first
place. The fantasy book series Eragon just got picked up by Disney thanks, specifically, to a
fandom surge on Twitter. Daredevil actor Charlie Cox has repeatedly said that the #SaveDaredevil
Twitter campaign saved his career after corporate disagreement got the show canceled on Netflix.
Morbius was re-released in theaters because clearly everyone memeing the thing on Twitter
wanted a chance to Morb all over the theater again. And, of course, there’s the Snyder Cut of
Justice League, where heads of the company went on record to say, quote: “Since I got here 14 months
ago, the chant to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut has been a daily drumbeat in our offices and inboxes. Well,
the fans have asked, and we are thrilled to finally deliver.” The ironic part of all of
that is in the aftermath, it came out the whole #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign was likely driven
by Snyder himself and an army of bots Just to get fans riled up as an act of revenge
against Warner Brothers. Regardless, those are just a few examples of how this relatively
small social media platform made up of a VERY vocal minority has historically had a huge sway
in the entertainment industry. So, with all of that in mind,
we wanted to find out just how skewed these results can get. We needed a way to compare
what people were actually talking about on Twitter to what was actually being watched
beyond the Twittersphere. Now, finding the data about what was trending on Twitter is actually
pretty easy. Several websites have archived that exact information by time and date. But,
finding exactly what to compare it against is kind of difficult, you can’t exactly just look
at box office numbers to gauge success anymore. Getting big bucks at theaters is great, don’t
get me wrong. It’s just not the only metric that matters anymore. So we turned to Parrot Analytics,
a data company who made their name with a software that's able to track the “true demand” for movies,
TV, and digital media. They do this by running a complex algorithm that takes a lot of variables
into account: How many people watched? In what demographics? For how long? How does this product
trend in search results? Where does it fall in the news cycle? Even stuff like: How much money are
people spending on this thing? And, what is the tone of the search results and news coverage? Now
that is a lot of data to throw into an alchemical analytics concoction, and some of it did make me
squint my eyes suspiciously. But, you know what? I think that it offers a valuable insight into
what people are watching and it can act as a kind of a North Star for our analysis here today.
Looking at their Top 10 list of Most In Demand Overall Movie as of July 2022, the results were
eye-opening to put it mildly. Sure, a lot of the list is what you would expect: Spider-Man at the
top? Absolutely expected. The Batman in the top five? Sure, because Batman. But then you had some
surprises. Venom: Let There be Carnage earned the number two most in-demand spot. That tracks
considering it was the third highest grossing film of 2021. But the day it was released, Venom 2
trended for only 90 minutes. It only got itself 11,850 tweets. Now compare that to the number one
spot of Spider-Man… the day No Way Home released, Spider-Man trended with a maximum 398,000
tweets. Its longest trend streak ran for seven and a half hours. Meanwhile,
Marvel AND Tom Holland were also breaking into the most trending tab, with 182,000 and 131,500
tweets respectively. Venom 2 was a TENTH of those. No one was talking about this thing
over on Twitter, despite it being one of the most successful, highest earning movies of last year.
Meanwhile, Zack Snyder’s Justice League shows the exact opposite pattern. On the
day it was announced, some variation of “Snyder” or “Snyder Cut” peaked on trending with 170,000
tweets and a streak of seven hours. On the day it was released it peaked with 332,000
tweets and had an insane streak of 19 hours. I mean, that’s on par with Spider-Man numbers. And
yet despite all of this online chatter and this massive multi-month long fan campaign,
it was only watched by only 2.2 million homes the first week with reports noting that just
36% of people who watched it actually finished it. The last one I’ll call out for now is The
Eternals. On the day of its release, Eternals trended on Twitter with just over 99,000 tweets,
and a streak of 4.5 hours. Not bad by any means, but nowhere close to Black Widow, which trended
with nearly double the amount of tweets, 193,000, and a streak of 7.5 hours on its release date
(July 9th, 2021). And yet, Eternals managed to out-perform its rival MCU release in all metrics.
In short, Twitter’s trends just don’t seem to consistently align with what people are actually
watching, what people actually care about. Which brings us back to the question that I started
off with: what is the actual biggest show on TV right now? Believe it or not, according
to Nielsen Ratings, the most watched show on television right now by a HUGE margin is this
series called Yellowstone. It’s a gritty drama about modern cowboys and rural ranch politics with
lots and lots of fights. The report claims that 13% of all households watching TV while
Yellowstone was on were watching the show. This translated to a staggering 9.3 million viewers
during its Season 4 finale in January of 2022. Literally the only thing that beats Yellowstone
on broadcast TV is football. The ah, handegg one, not the European “futbol”. Even more incredibly,
the show doesn’t even air on one of the mainstream channels like NBC or CBS. Instead, it’s on the
Paramount Network, which used to be called Spike TV, home of CSI reruns and Deadliest Warrior.
While digging into this data at first, I thought these viewership numbers had to be juiced in
some way. The “views” coming out of TV Ratings can sometimes be inflated, so I had to triple
check myself. But apparently, the series and its creator have made so much money for Paramount
that they’re going all in on the Yellowstone IP. It’s spun off into a prequel called 1883,
which itself is getting a spinoff about the real-life Western hero Bass Reeves,
it’s also getting a Prequel Sequel called 1923 starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren,
and another contemporary spinoff called 6666 set in Texas instead of Montana. There’s basically
an entire Yellowstone Cinematic Universe, and no one on Team Theorist knew about this thing. NOT
ONE! But you know who did know about it? Our parents. People that aren’t on Twitter. Yea,
one of our team members actually asked their mom if they watched Yellowstone and got this
text message back: “LOVE IT!!! Cowboys are cute.” Apparently everyone they knew would
watch it and talk about it. Even the dogs would bark whenever a horse would show up on screen.
And, as you might expect, looking at Google Trends data, the show crushes. Not even Black Panther can
catch it the week of its release. But now, look at the Twitter data from when that finale aired
back in January. Practically nothing. It barely broke into Twitter's trending list, maxing out at
13,000 tweets with a longest streak of just 3.5 hours. Basically, this was barely a blip on
Twitter’s radar. There seems to be this massive audience of apparent Boomers and older Gen-Xers
that is really underrepresented on Twitter, and therefore the resulting trends that people talk
about on YouTube and Twitch and whatever. Really, this sort of silent majority when it comes to what
people are actually consuming is fascinating. Probably deserves its own Theory at some point.
In short, as Twitter teeters on the verge of collapse right now, I wanted to make this episode
to point out the echo chamber that it keeps a lot of its users in. And the false perception that it
gives about the world of content around us. I think a lot of its users assumed that this was the
new “water cooler,” the neutral place that would serve as an accurate representation of everything
happening around us, a place where people would go and gather to chat about their favorite TV shows,
movies, sports, politics, whatever. But no. It is not that. It feeds you what it thinks
you want to hear and prevents you from learning about things that are important to the people
around you. Sometimes those things are trivial, like a show about hunky cowboys, but oftentimes,
it’s stuff that’s a whole lot more important. And so, regardless of the platform’s future,
I’d warn you to not fall into the trap that the Disneys and Warner Brothers did, making decisions
off a few tweets coming from a very vocal subset of the most extreme users, or worse, basing
your opinions off of an army of bots created by deep-pocketed users with ulterior motives. Now,
if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go see how Rip’s sheriff investigation goes after his accident
with those tourists. It’s a Yellowstone thing. You wouldn’t understand…or maybe, now you will.
But hey, that’s just a Theory! A Film Theory! Aaaaaaand cut.
foreign