THE cultural significance of Snakes on a Plane was assured long before its feverishly hyped premiere.
As the first blockbuster movie to emerge from a campaign on the internet, it has been hailed as the Hollywood equivalent of the Arctic Monkeys.
There were no previews but this did not discourage tens of thousands of expectant fans from booking out cinemas in Britain and the United States. They felt the film belonged to them, a word of mouth success on the internet that grew into a pop cultural phenomenon.
The creator of the first film to harness the marketing power of the internet said that Snakes’s impact would be difficult to replicate. Daniel Myrick, co-director of The Blair Witch Project, which cost $35,000 and made more than $250 million, said: “What makes films like this a success is that (the campaigns around them) aren’t premeditated and people don’t feel like they’re being marketed to by Hollywood; that’s why they like to get behind them.”
Fans hooked by the film’s outrageous title and star, Samuel L. Jackson, made home-made trailers, posted their own dialogue suggestions and designed spoof merchandise. They even managed to force the studio into reversing its decision to rename the film Pacific Air Flight 121.
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Jackson himself is relaxed about the pressure of living up to the hype: “It’s just Snakes on a Plane. It’s not Snakes on Brokeback Mountain.”