BigShinyThing

About six months ago we noticed the noise online regarding Snakes on a Plane – an apparent b-movie that had sparked the imaginations of a gazzilion bloggers and film geeks with its silly and immediately get-able title. The noise was roughly split into three camps: those who thought the film sounded great but silly and wrote about it seriously; geeks who thought the whole thing was a hoax and lunatics who used the whole idea to build wealth of photos, shorts, blogs and general arsing about on the theme of being trapped on a plane with a bunch of snakes.

At the time, the BST line was that the film was a nice postmodern exercise in ‘build it and they will come’ type hype. The apparent in character endorsement of proposed star Samuel L Jackson helped. We theorised that New Line Cinema — the film’s distributor — was chucking the meme out there to see if it generated enough interest to justify making a movie. Hell — it beats laying the $100m-odd wager that equates to most film releases nowadays. We thought we’d wait and see what happened and to be honest we were also hedging our bets.

But in the event something even more interesting has occurred. Snakes on a Plane and its fantastic premise (that’s an elevator pitch if ever we saw one…) has become the world’s first mainstream consumer generated film with ideas (and catchphrases) thought up by bloggers rumoured to be integrated into the final ‘plot’.

Jackson himself is quoted as saying:

I hope that people in studios are looking and paying attention and trying to figure out how and why this phenomenon took place. I hope that there’s some young filmmaker somewhere that knows, that understands that now they could put a premise on the internet — ‘my premise for this film is… boom… who has a scene?’ — and people will start writing the first scene for that particular film, and then they’ll choose that scene. Somebody’ll write the next scene, and they’ll choose that particular scene, until they end up with a whole film, and then somebody
will say, ‘Who do you think should be in this film?’, and then they go through that, and they come up with a whole cast list of people, and if everybody sends a dollar in, we can hire these particular people and shoot this particular film, and we’ll have a film that’s all-inclusive, that’s something that a lot of people came together on, and had a collaborative passion about. And I think that would be kind of a wonderful thing to see happen. And hopefully that will be somewhere down the line… [audience applauds]

Source: Henry Jenkins’ blog. Note: We tip his upcoming tome, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, as the Next Big Thing.

We have written about collaborative film projects before [Swarm of Angels, the 1 second film project] — but a mass market studio one effort is really big news and — as Jackson says, has the potential to change the model for the future. Our friends at Addictive also didn’t miss this story — they’ve produced a trailer for the film [above].

Snakes on a Plane is released on 18th August.