PRODUCER David T. Friendly started to believe "Little Miss Sunshine" might turn into a word-of-mouth hit when his college roommate's parents and a doctor friend both sent him e-mail congratulations. "It's a little unsettling when you get an e-mail from your dermatologist," Friendly says, "asking about your per-screen averages."
Unsettling, perhaps. And also the wave of the future.
Recommendations from friends and associates always have been a critical ingredient in building box-office momentum, just as negative word of mouth accelerates a middling movie's downfall. Yet the speed at which such assessments are transmitted has never been so fast, nor the effect -- as "Little Miss Sunshine" is dramatizing -- so profound.
Movie studios once felt confident they had at least two weekends to sell as many movie tickets as possible before toxic buzz would undermine their multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. Hollywood executives now say that the proliferation of movie-related e-mail, Internet blogs and text messaging has reduced that window to mere hours, as the quick decline of last weekend's heavily promoted "Snakes on a Plane" proved
"With most movies, you try to steal as much gross as you can until word of mouth catches up with you, which can be instant," says John Lesher, the head of Paramount's specialty division, which has one of the year's strongest word-of-mouth performers in the global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
The life cycle of a word-of-mouth movie depends on its ability to ride a wave of critical success into more and more theaters, the inverse of the typical big summer movie that comes out instantly in thousands of theaters and often vanishes in a couple of weeks. Unlike special-effects-laden star vehicles, word-of-mouth releases often cost a fraction of the typical summer movie and have much smaller marketing budgets. They consequently can have a huge return on investment, as opposed to Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible III," which was essentially a break-even movie.
"Little Miss Sunshine" began playing in seven theaters on July 26. The movie moved into wider national release last weekend and is now playing in 691 theaters, including some in such cities as San Antonio and Omaha. It already has eclipsed a raft of more heavily marketed summer movies that enjoyed few reviewer and audience recommendations.
