BadMovieClub – The First Twitter Flash Mob

On 13th Feb 2009, several thousand people watched the same ‘bad’ film at exactly the same time and shared their collective ‘disappointment’ via Twitter. I was one of those people.

A few days ago I received a message from a friend on Twitter; join #badmovieclub it said. Turns out it was spawned from Graham Linehan’s off the cuff tweet about getting people together to watch a bad movie at the same time. Graham who? He wrote the classic series Father Ted and more recently The IT Crowd.

Over a 3 day period that single tweet spiralled into a monster, the ugly kind with lots of eyes and more tentacles than the Bush administration. The idea resulted in a flash mob at 9pm Friday 13th February during which everyone would watch M Night Shyamalan’s movie The Happening at the same time, adding their own commentary via the #badmovieclub hashtag on Twitter.

The impressive thing wasn’t that thousands of people agreed to get together (virtually) in such a short space of time. It wasn’t that BadMovieClub got large numbers of people doing the same thing either. It was that one single well placed tweet managed to persuade so many of the movie going public to go out and watch a film as awful as "The Happening" in the first place!

With one comment Graham Linehan managed to do what movie studios pay their marketing departments millions of dollars to do – persuade thousands of people to watch a shoddy film.

The power of Twitter lies in the simplified nature of it. Unlike other forms of Instant Messaging or even the Facebook status system, Twitter messages can be seen by everyone. When people tweeted about BadMovieClub, they were promoting BadMovieClub. There was no need for any kind of ad campaign because the mere act of tweeting on the hashtag alerted a user’s followers to its existence.

On Friday evening many Twitter users suddenly found their Twitter message box full of seemingly nonsensical tweets about bees, wind, plastic plants, and Marky Mark’s furrowed brow. When you see your friends all talking about the same thing, it’s only natural to want to join in. When you know there is a celebrity involved, you find yourself trying to impress just to get them to retweet (RT) your comment.

BadMovieClub didn’t just stop at Twitter, however. Many people made a night of it, having friends around to watch the movie, even displaying the Tweets on a giant screen. The national press have also got in on the act, with both Metro and Sky News reporting the event (a minute or so into the video clip). I guess I have to ask you to look out for my newretro avatar on the sky footage! Yes, that’s my tweet and yes I really did quite like Point Break, even if I’d rather that wasn’t broadcast to the whole nation – can I sue Sky for that I wonder?.

As flash mobs go, and this was a flash mob even if it was quite raw, I believe this to be the first ever on Twitter. Sure there have been flash mobs organised over Twitter, but I believe this one was the first actually held on Twitter, as well as in your lounge, your bedroom, your PC, your mobile phone, or where ever you happened to be.

To glinner, badmovieclub, jupitusphillip, lauriepink, and all the others that took part – I salute you! There are plans being discussed for future events, so follow badmovieclub and keep an eye on the BadMovieClub website for news.

Now please excuse me whilst I try and contribute to Graham and Phil’s Monkey vs Bear war on Twitter. On Twitter, you see, we are all only 1 degree of separation away from each other; and Darth Vader has an awful lot of friends, although not as many as Stephen Fry.

We’re micro-blogging our stop-motion console game Cletus Clay at cletusclay, and you can find several of the Tuna team on Twitter: newretro, SarahQ, andrewcrawshaw, stationBob and clay_Ape.