Is *anyone* really surprised
That SNAKES ON A PLANE is bombing? Come on, admit it. You really thought it was going to pull through and rise above the rampant idiocy of its own high concept/title, didn't you? Well, I never did. It was a bad idea when it was called PACIFIC FLIGHT WHATEVER NUMBER and, granted, it's only real shot at success was Embracing It's Own Badness and going whole hog and being an awful movie. Not that said plan was much of a shot.
It's like manufacturing a cult movie. You can't. But more importantly, why would you WANT to? Cult movies almost inevitably die in their initial run and are only "appreciated" after the fact. And by "appreciated" I mean to say find an audience at all. Said audience is rarely if ever enough to make these things profitable unless they're starting on the bottom of the budgetary ladder (and oftentimes, distribution eats up those profits so that the original creators often don't get to cash in on the success of the film anyways.) Besides, most cult movies simply languish in obscurity or never find a following at all beyond the hardcore cult geek.
You simply can't base conventional/mainstream success on this kind of campaign. If you have money to spend on the campaign in the first place, then you're not the kind of scrappy and idiosyncratic filmmaker that's likely to have a devoted following. The giant snake head on the floor of the Convention Center at San Diego this year? Eye catching, perhaps, but it also automagically excluded SNAKES ON A PLANE from being embraced as the Little Film That Could (though the airline safety cards were smirkfully funny). See, the thing is, every time people said "Snakes on a PLANE!", they were *laughing* at it. I don't know about you, but I'll rent a movie to laugh at it, but I sure as hell ain't spending ten bucks plus popcorn plus soda plus the twenty bucks at the bar beforehand to get a laugh like that. Maybe it'll make it's production costs back in video and overseas, or maybe it already has, but it seems pretty clear that it's not going to even make back its viral marketing costs in its initial release.
And now maybe movies get to learn what comics learned a couple years back. Just because people are talking about it on the blogosphere, doesn't mean that they're going to plunk down any money to actually buy it. Talk is cheap, etc.
EDIT to add - Ah, so SNAKES is on top of the box office lists with $30 million this week. Being on top was the most that the studio should have expected out of this, so an attaboy for New Line and the SNAKES crew. But I'll point out that SUPERMAN RETURNS ruled the box office for a week and still came out smelling like a dead fish (at least perceptionswise). SNAKES is still not going to be any kind of runaway success.