The Great Facebook John Carter – Lynn Collins Mystery Surge
As many or most of you know, the alliance of ERB-John Carter groups includes, as its largest entity, the Facebook John Carter Sequel Group with a membership of 11.700. That group was started by Erik Jessen and some of the crew of the movie John Carter, and is organized as a Facebook “Group” rather than a Facebook “Page” which is the format which Facebook says is best for growing a movement. The reason for that is that pages are findable by search engines, etc., whereas groups are not.
So, the Facebook group has a “Facebook Page” as well, which was started many months after the Group was started, and has always been a bit of an afterthought. Yesterday morning at this time, the “Page” had 3,400 likes and when new posts would go up on the page, they would typically get about 1000 views. New “Likes” were coming in at a rate of 20-30 per week.
Then yesterday happened.
Jan Austin posted a brief post about Lynn Collins having tweeted that she would love to participate in a John Carter sequel. Here is that post:
For those who don’t do Twitter, you might want to know that Lynn Collins was asked this past Wednesday if she would do another John Carter and she replied “ALWAYS yes.” We have been re-tweeting her post!
lynn collins @lynncollins7 10 Apr
“@mrwiggly7: @lynncollins7 ” Would you do another JOHN CARTER movie if i asked you nicely ? ” :)”don’t need to be nice, ALWAYS yes.#Mars
That was it — nothing special on the front end.
But …. mysteriously, unlike all the other posts which are getting 1,000 or so views, this one has gotten 28,000 since yesterday morning, along with 189 Facebook shares.
Most interestingly – since the post went up, total Likes on the FB page have gone from 3,400 to 4,758.
No one has been able to quite figure out what happened. Unlike on a blog or website where you can easily find out where traffic is coming from, a Facebook Page has less information available — at least until the weekly statistical update is provided. That update will be provided on April 15th. In the meantime, people who are coming to the page are saying they saw it on their Facebook newsfeed, and many of them are people who had “Liked” the official John Carter Disney Facebook Page (there are 442,000 people in this category) . . . One theory is that a change in the FB algorithms suddenly resulted in this post getting a different treatment than prior ones.
Anyway — the sequel movement folks are dancing in the digital streets this morning.
The new likes are growing.
And the mystery continues.
5 comments
John Wojtczuk wrote
Yes, I agree. The odd thing for me was the prior to the movie coming out, I was all poised to not like Lynn Collins as Dejah. I felt that what I’d seen in trailers was not very impressive. Then I saw the movie and did a 180 on her. While I think Stanton may have overdone the “warrior princess” aspect — that didn’t detract from the overall impression that she was a real plus.
One thing — we hear so much here about John Carter being mopey, whiny, etc . . . . . one thing I haven’t heard discussed is whether this aspect of his character was heightened by making Dejah so overtly feisty and warrior-like, as opposed to just beautiful, intelligent, and courageous as in the book. In other words, did the decision to go more in the direction of sassy warrior princess with Dejah in some way amplify the perceived problems with John Carter/Taylor Kitsch?
I believe Mr, Page had hit the nail on the head – Ms. Collins was – to me at least – the driving force to the entire story on Barsoom. I think Mr. Kitsch’s John Carter was well done, but Collins made “DT” shine.
hmmmm…
This doesn’t surprise me one iota. To me Lynn Collins was the saving grace of this movie. She is the character that breathed life into this adaptation of the tale. We pretty much all know the characterization of John Carter was botched, whether you attribute it to the writer’s changes to “modernize” the hero or Taylor Kitsch’s sullen portrayal of the character, but I totally bought into Collin’s Dejah. I think her performance is why, against popular expectations, this movie actually skews very high with women.
Besides being a hell of a lot better to look at physically, there was always something going on behind her eyes that illuminated her character’s portrayal. Way back in the beginning, I wanted to start a campaign to embarrass/coerce Disney to change their marketing strategy and had the idea of a viral video with someone wearing a classic sandwich board sign that had a picture of Taylor Kitsch on the front with the words “Do you want this ?”. When the questioneer turned around, there would be a nice hot photo of Collins as Dejah with the words, “or this ! “. The Disney morons hardy used her at all in the marketing.
I’m not about to understand anything about social medias, but it sure doesn’t seem to be a bad thing! 🙂