Whatever way you look at it, this is a bumper year for movie blockbusters; Marvel’s The Avengers has most likely broken yet another box office record in the time it took you to read this sentence, and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is only weeks away, threatening to topple Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with only a Batmobile and the need for a lozenge as his weapons. But, if you were to judge this year’s movies solely by the success of their trailers on the Internet, an entirely different movie might end up standing triumphant. A much more sparkly movie.
Yahoo! Movies is reporting that the trailer for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 has set a new record for the number of unique views in a 24 hour period after going live earlier this week. Yahoo! had a (short, given the number of YouTube videos and other unofficial bootlegged versions in addition to “official” additions) exclusive window for the trailer’s debut on Wednesday this week, and that window set off a stream of visits and views unlike anything else the site had seen: Over 7 million unique views in 24 hours. “Yahoo! Movies attracts over 27 million unique users a month, so 7 million streams is a sizable achievement for a single day,” a Yahoo! spokesman told PaidContent.
Happily for the company, even though the trailer is no longer an exclusive, it’s still attracting visitors. “It’s holding strong. The outreach on social channels from both the Yahoo! and [Twilight studio] Summit side really established us as the place to go for the trailer,” the spokesman explained. In one of those happy ironies of show business, the previous record holder before Breaking Dawn – Part 2 took the crown for the most viewed trailer in a 24 hour period on Yahoo! Movies? That would’ve been The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1. There’s something to be said for consistency, it seems.
While Yahoo! can feel happy with the results of its partnership with Summit, however, there’s still reason for Summit to feel somewhat nervous about the prospects for the final film in its lucrative franchise. While 7,000,000 streams in 24 hours is nothing to be sneezed at, the October 2011 debut of a trailer for Avengers on iTunes managed to rack up 10 million downloads in the same period, a record that was then trumped by the December 2011 release of a Dark Knight Rises trailer on the service, which peaked at 12.5 million over the course of a day.
It’s possible that the discrepancy may be the size of the different platforms – Breaking Dawn – Part 2 was, after all, a record breaker for Yahoo! – or simply a commentary on the ways in which different audiences interact with material offered to them, but it’s also a strong possibility that, in this year’s conflict between superheroes and vampire romance, it’s the guys in the skintight suits who’ll emerge victorious… But I wouldn’t make that kind of comment to any Twihards you meet at Comic-Con, just in case.
