05 March 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant

Who’s watching the Watchmen?

The long awaited film of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons graphic novel, Watchmen is finally released on Friday 6th of March. The popularity and critical acclaim of the novel meant that Watchmen was always destined to be a huge movie but delays caused by legal issues mean that the hype has been building for longer than usual. What has that meant for internet fans of Rorschach, Dr Manhattan and the other Crimebusters?

Social media sites have been getting huge traffic as a result of the impending release of Watchmen. According to compete.com the big winners of internet traffic, outside of the official Watchmen site and the Wikipedia page has been YouTube, where people have been searching for just about anything on the film - trailers, interviews, behind the scenes clips, you name it. There are currently 8,600 results on YouTube for a film that hasn't yet been released. These already include parodies such as Two and a Half Watchmen.

Film review site Rotten Tomatoes is a good example of a niche social media site that gets loads of traffic when a new big film is released. According to compete.com it is the tenth most search-referred domain for the query "watchmen".

As far as social media goes, YouTube, Blogspot and MySpace were all in the top ten with Rotten Tomatoes, Facebook 11th and 12th respectively and Twitter at 21.

By its nature, Twitter is very much "real time", I would expect the number of Twitter users actually tweeting about the movie to increase hugely closer to the release and continue as people tweet their thoughts about it.

A quick Twitter search shows that tweets about Watchmen are coming thick and fast. At the time of writing there are a few every second - many of them with positive messages, with users having seen previews most looking forward to seeing it on release. Tweets such as 20thcenturymarc's "Seeing Watchmen tonight and breathlessly excited already" and only add to the hype surrounding the release.

So what has Warner Bros. done to get social media in such a frenzy? Actually, very little other than make a blockbuster movie. There is a (quite low-key) Facebook page and they've released various trailers over the last few months on YouTube, MySpace etc. but really, nothing more than most major films do. The main differences between the hype for this and say Brad Pitt's Benjamin Button (based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald) is the amount of time leading up to the release of the film and the fact that millions of people have already read - and fallen in love with - the original graphic novel.

As mentioned previously, Warner Brothers didn't plan the delay but it seems to be working in their favour. The large gap between filming and release has allowed hype to build on the internet in a way that doesn't often happen. Usually the general public usually only hears about a film shortly before release. It's possible that for certain films in future, especially remakes of older films or interpretations of books we might see film houses sitting on movies for a bit longer than usual to let the internet anticipation grow naturally.

Watchmen has been released in some countries for a day or two already but is released in the UK and US on Friday 6th of March. The initial feedback on the web from people who have seen the film seems very positive. The internet, and social media in particular, has made this an interesting movie release but is reviewing the movie on Twitter whilst watching it taking things a bit too far? @jimmyjame doesn't seem to think so; "watching Watchmen at da movies strange but interesting movie."

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