There's a definite correlation between the response to a movie over Twitter on opening night and how well it does at the box office opening weekend. What's no clear is if it's an effect or a cause. Is it possible for negative twitter comments to kill a movie? At the very least it's certainly a possibility.
So would it be disingenuous for people to start twittering during opening night for The Last Airbender about how the movie is bad, even if they haven't actually gone to see it? What if they specify that it's bad because of the whitewashing and not necessarily because of the quality of the movie itself?
Of course i don't have a twitter account, so i don't actually have to decide that for myself. I'm leaning towards skipping the movie in theatres, even though the trailer looks really cool. It depends a lot on
shelleycat though. If my half-japanese girlfriend insists on going to see it then i'm not sure if i have a leg to stand on with the "but it's unfair to asian-americans" argument. When i mentioned the whitewashing thing to her her first response was that it didn't seem that important to her since it's set in a fantasy world, and her second response was something like "did they at least use CG to make them look asian? They can do that now, right?" She figures if they can make people blue for the other Avatar then anyone ought to be able to play a character of any race. I'm not quite sure how to respond to that on a theoretical level, though i expect that practically speaking that's still to pricey to do for movies where you can actually find actors of whatever race you happen to need.
Luckily however she's usually pretty amenable to the "let's just watch it on Netflix when it comes out on DVD" option :)
So would it be disingenuous for people to start twittering during opening night for The Last Airbender about how the movie is bad, even if they haven't actually gone to see it? What if they specify that it's bad because of the whitewashing and not necessarily because of the quality of the movie itself?
Of course i don't have a twitter account, so i don't actually have to decide that for myself. I'm leaning towards skipping the movie in theatres, even though the trailer looks really cool. It depends a lot on
shelleycat though. If my half-japanese girlfriend insists on going to see it then i'm not sure if i have a leg to stand on with the "but it's unfair to asian-americans" argument. When i mentioned the whitewashing thing to her her first response was that it didn't seem that important to her since it's set in a fantasy world, and her second response was something like "did they at least use CG to make them look asian? They can do that now, right?" She figures if they can make people blue for the other Avatar then anyone ought to be able to play a character of any race. I'm not quite sure how to respond to that on a theoretical level, though i expect that practically speaking that's still to pricey to do for movies where you can actually find actors of whatever race you happen to need.Luckily however she's usually pretty amenable to the "let's just watch it on Netflix when it comes out on DVD" option :)
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