Lookin’ for Data in Alderaan Places
Here’s an unpopular Star Wars opinion: meh.
In my impressionable teen years Episodes 1 through 3 were released in an ugly fashion and Episodes 4 through 6 seemed outdated. I’m part of a lost generation who was told that Star Wars was George Lucas’s gift from the heavens, but we never really drank the kool aid.
And Disney is now selling a lot of kool aid.
With a $200 Million dollar budget and a projected ~$125 Million marketing budget, The Force Awakens will be big, maybe the best opening of all time big.
First a disclaimer. As of writing this, Star War’s trailer was viewed more than 75 million times on YouTube and 14 Million on Facebook. Trailers are pretty much free advertising for movies. People love watching them and sharing them.
We didn’t see all 90 Million plays of the video, only a fraction, but, a statistically relevant one.
We took a look at Embedly’s data on The Force Awakens. So here, ❤.
#1 The first day is huge for any trailer.
People make up their mind on the movie the first day and don’t look back. 80% of the Star Wars plays are in the first 24 hours of the release.
#2 You just got to get them to hit play.
With trailers, once people start watching, they watch the whole thing. Above is a heatmap of The Star Wars trailer, the Independence Day trailer and the Revenant. Once a person commits, they will stay for the whole damn thing.
#3 There will be nerds.
Reddit has a subreddit called starwars leaks. Here is the first comment I stumbled upon.
“Han is Obi-Wan in VII and Luke will be the Yoda of VIII and IX. Billy D will be the Billy D of VIII and IX again. Same same.” — jcbhan
These “Experts” watched and rewatched and rewatched the trailer with a fine tooth comb. The graph above shows their heatmap.
#4 Star Wars will be big.
We saw the trailer embedded on over 350 different domains and over 1,300 different URLs. As a comparison, we saw The Revenant on 20 domains and 300 URLs.
In case you missed it, here’s the trailer.
A final thought: I wonder how often John Boyega looks at Mark Hamill’s IMDB and starts to think he should practice his voice acting.
