This week I’ve been pondering going to see “A Scanner Darkly”, as I’m all home alone – cinema isn’t something I normally get the oppo for. When I rang the missus, she asked why I wasn’t more interested in Snakes On A Plane – after all I’d been telling her about it for ages, whereas I only read a review of ‘Scanner’ this week. Strangely though, I just have no interest in the actual movie of Snakes On A Plane.

My misgivings seem born out by a post from New Marketing guru Seth Godin, who has noted that the SOAP box office is down and people don’t seem to be willing to follow the hype on this one. I think in this case though, the hype may actually have been counter-productive for them.

I don’t know if people were actually getting involved with the movie during the months of creativity and japing, more that they were getting involved with an in-joke about a preposterous movie scenario. You don’t actually need to see the movie for the joke to be funny – the joke is just that someone is actually making this film. In fact the fans may well have been far more interested in their own takes and parodies on the movie, rather than the director’s take, and be happy to leave it at that. The real movie becomes just one more meme parody in a long list, and a late one at that – bo-ring!

Contrast maybe with the Blair Witch – a movie spread through internet hype, but centrally-generated rather than user-generated hype. People didn’t feel a stake in their own version of it, and were more just passing on a straight marketing message, rather than creating their own jokes around a meme. Maybe SOAP is more like ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us‘ – a good in-joke, but certainly not one which sent people scurrying to buy retro arcade games.