Twitter is being used to predict the future box office takings of films courtesy of researchers at Hewlett Packard. They have studied 3 million tweets about 25 different movies, including Avatar. (is there no privacy??) Apparently the rate at which messages are produced can be used to forecast box office visits before opening. The faster people tweet about a film, the more likely they are to go and see it. They say its “tapping into collective intelligence” and word of mouth builds audience. Their analysis predicted that the zombie film “The Crazies” would take $16.8 in its first weekend and it actually took $16.06m. The forecast for “Dear John” was $30.7 and it took $30.5.

These guys have developed algorithms to analyse tweets in the run-up to a film launch measuring the rate at which they were produced….”Get a life” springs to mind.

Avatar which actually took $232.2m on opening weekend, will showing in Hotels using Acentic systems.