12 Jul Sharknado Causes Twitter Storm
Every so often a movie comes along and impacts the world and changes cinema as we know it. Citizen Kane. Jaws. Star Wars. Avatar. Sharknado.
Wait, Sharknado!?
Last night, Syfy premiered its latest disaster/monster movie mash up about a weather phenomenon that well, like the title says, creates a tornado full of sharks and attacks Los Angeles. At one point, the film even had its lead, Ian Ziering of 90210 fame, jump through a shark with a chainsaw. That’s quality television.
While this is nothing new for Syfy, an NBCUniversal brand that has become famous (or infamous) for creating B-movies from creative minds such as Roger Corman, last night something amazing happened. Through the use of Twitter, a social conversation was created that is rarely seen and in one giant swoop, the entire country was talking at once with one another about Sharknado. It became so popular that while the film was airing, #Sharknado became the top trending hashtag Thursday evening and early Friday morning with over 5,000 tweets per minute during the final minutes of the film as well as the number 4 Google trending topic Thursday evening with over 100,000 searches.
What makes this so amazing is that Twitter was able to create a true social watching experience, allowing fans of the film to relish in all its goofy glory at once. While Syfy will undoubtedly re-air the movie over and over again during the weeks to come, the watching experience will never be the same. Even top Hollywood heavyweights took to Twitter to voice their opinions on the social success that is Sharknado.
But quite possibly the best conversation of them all was from Syfy itself, responding to tweets from Mia Farrow and Olivia Wilde.
