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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwoSix" data-source="post: 9129495" data-attributes="member: 205">Yea, but that's kinda my point.  The Super Mario Bros. memes were mostly negative, but the narrative around them was "Chris Pratt is kind of a douche and he doesn't sound anything like Mario."  It was a slight ding about the overall quality and authenticity of the movie, but the movie turned out to be both a) pretty good and b) sell tickets like hotcakes.  The meme narrative was almost entirely unrelated to the actual narrative of what drives tickets sales.Whereas the Barbiheimer thing became a meme because of the super weird contrast between two movies that were expected to be big, Barbie really shouldn't have been expected to be big!  It became so because firstly because of the quality of the director, and secondly the expectations set when both the trailers and articles discussing the movie took pains to hide what the movie might actually be like, which turned the movie into a mystery.  Good director + what's going on with a toy movie having a super secret script + strongly positive vibes around the lead (seriously, everyone loves Margot Robbie) built up a relatively quiet narrative of positive hype, and then the Barbiheimer meme turned the release into an actual event, something which people were craving since the Marvel releases are no longer event releases.Long story short, the amount of internet buzz has no predictive power, but you can sometimes read the narrative driving the buzz to get a sense if something big could cascade into something bigger.  But even then, most of that predictive power will only be obvious in hindsight.</blockquote>

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