How much did it cost to make? Thirty, maybe forty bucks? I don’t think New Line’s worried just yet. 
That said, I didn’t think it was going to do a whole pile of business. It was intensely anticipated among Internet types but I think sometimes hard-core Internet users don’t remember that most people are NOT hard core Internet users.
Come on- be realistic. This was not a movie that was going to make $100 million in its opening weekend. Combining the grassroots advertising with the ridiculously over-the-top premise, and the fact that school has just started back, I’d say that making half its budget in three and a half days is damn good. Fifteen million isn’t chump change- at ten bucks a ticket (being generous- Mr. Kitty and I paid $5.50), that’s a million and a half people seeing this movie.
It’s far too soon to call it a flop.
Hit or flop has nothing to do with how much money it makes. Eventually, with all subsidiary rights sales, it will make money. Virtually every film put out today does, no matter what the studios say when they’re crying poverty.
Hit or flop is all about expectations. The expectations were much higher than reality. Everybody in the industry was wondering whether internet hype of the highest magnitude could be turned into dollars. The answer appears to be a resounding no.
Is $15 million more than what Pacific Flight #121 would have made if it were just dumped on an apathetic audience in August? Sure it is. But that’s not what anybody in the business is comparing it to. They had hopes that there was a way around the problem of people not showing up for mediocre to indifferent films in the theaters. Hype isn’t it.
Maybe now they’ll just have to fall back on the last desperate resort: making better movies.* 
*Which is not the same thing as saying that SoaP is not an entertaining film. I have no idea. But the volume of complaints about movie quality has been rising for years and the studios either have to listen or die in a surfeit of sequels.
Well, part of the problem with that is that SoaP/PAF121 was never going to be what anyone would call one of the “better movies”.
If anyone at the studio was really gambling on this as the formula to make the Blair Witch Project lightning strike again on purpose, then they’re more out of touch with reality than we thought.
The harcore fans, Jackson included, were into this as a B-movie for the sake of making a B-movie. The “hype” was itself mostly fandom-based for most of the past year. But… some people at some point seem to have lost a sense of proportion. Others, like RickJay and myself, were aware all along that however righteous your small but loudly vocal cult, that small thing is gonna hurt you when counting dollars or votes.
I haven’t seen it yet. I was just wondering something; based on a lot of the comments here, it seems that the big appeal is that SOAP is a self-aware B-movie that happened to be released in the theaters instead of going direct to video…but isn’t that pretty much what Slither was, too?
Slither’s characters were a lot more clever. SoAP has some of the worst writing and acting imaginable, like someone stretched out an episode of Saved by the Bell with footage from National Geographic. I laughed throughout the entire thing and had a huge grin on my face for hours afterwards, like everyone I went to see it with.
How to watch Snakes on a Plane:
-See it with at least five friends, at a time when there will be others in the theatre (this is one time teens in a theatre actually enhance the experience).
-Don’t go sober.
-Know what to expect. You won’t like it if you can’t appreciate that one flight attendant’s nearing retirement or recognize that this means she’ll be dead by the end, after saving a baby, natch
Saw it Friday night and enjoyed it very much! But, this $15 million gross at the box office being called a “failure” is flat out wrong. The much talked-about internet hype and buzz was the failure. Fully 90% of the people I spoke with at my work or in my neighborhood had never heard of it! A bit more of the traditional marketing strategies is what would have boosted the box office receipt. Of the people I talked with, all had heard of or already seen “Talledeja Nights”!
(The best part of SoaP; when I dropped a rubber snake on my wife’s arm in the middle of the major snake attacks! Quite a reaction!)
Just to get it on record that I’m not an idiot who can’t do basic arithmetic: they revised the numbers on me since I posted that. The original daily grosses had Thursday and Friday at $7.5 million, so that Saturday and Sunday combined were another $7.5 million. But today’s figures are closer to $6.3 and $8.9 million. That’s a much better split. And Saturday’s gross was the same as Friday’s, which is very good for a heavily fan-base-oriented movie.
BTW, they did do traditional marketing. Samuel L. Jackson was on every talk show on television; tv ads were constant; magazine and newspaper articles were omnipresent. It was much more heavily traditionally promoted than Farrell’s movie. It’s just that the non-fan audience looked at the marketing and went, meh, and let it pass right out of mind.
Yeah … the Internet is not always an efficient driver of “cool” or “must see/do” in the marketplace of ideas. RickJay put it well:
There’s a question begged here: are hardcore Internet users really a monolithic group mind that all gravitated towards SOAP? Seems to me there’s a lot of Internet folk who passed on the movie, too.
For what it’s worth, there were a lot of web-geeky types in the concession lines at the cinema Friday night.
One guy was especially prototypical. Imagine a pencil-neck guy with a pot belly, his short-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up, and a chattering nasal voice: “Yeah, so do you have ‘Movie Bites’? Ice cream nuggets with a chocolate coating. Vanilla mostly. The best theaters have them. Do you have them? That’s what I really want.” - clerk: “Just what you see on display, sir.” - geek: “So is that a yes or a no? Do you have ‘Movie Bites’ or not? They’re really good. If you don’t have them you should get them. I bet you’d sell a lot of them.”
Clearly, he didn’t get out much.
My point earlier was that the people I talked with had never even heard of it, not just elected to not see the movie. I had been anticipating the movie because I followed teh buzz on the internet. But, comparing this to the marketing of “Talledja Night” (a movie I wont see even if you put a gun to my head):
Trailers at the Movies: SoaP - None; TN- many, loud and long
Commercials on TV: SoaP - none; TN- every other freaking commercial break!
Ads in print: Soap - none,; TN - too many
Talk shows: don’t watch 'em; People at work or in the neighborhhod only seem to watch Oprah.
MTV: I read about Samuael Jacksons great and hilarious speech, but I (and the people I talked with) haven’t watched EmpTyV in years.
I just think that with a little more effort, SoaP would have been a much bigger money-maker at the box-office, easily trouncing such drivel as TN.
The voice I hear in my head is Eddie Deezen
The movie is not going to be a failure financially. but it has undoubtedly come in below expectations.
I saw TV ads for Snakes on a Plane. And Samuel L. Jackson appeared on a couple of shows to promote the film (Jon Stewart was giddy when he appeared on The Daily Show.
What the hell? Is that a porno?
(“I WANT YOUR MOTHERFUCKING PANTIES ON THE MOTHERFUCKING FLOOR”)
Point of order: Talledega Nights was a much better movie than SoaP.
That’s not saying a lot, but it was. Funnier, too.
Of course, miles better than both is Little Miss Sunshine…