Sharknado may have been the toast of Twitter on Thursday night, but the cheesy monster movie didn’t generate any significant ratings for the folks at SyFy.
Writer Thunder Levin and director Anthony C. Ferrante’s low-budget endeavor was quite popular on the social media site. Thanks to approximately 387,000 mentions, the movie ended up becoming a worldwide trend . However, this unexpected popularity didn’t translate into a huge jump in actual viewers.
USA Today reports that Sharknado managed to pull in around 1.4 million viewers. While this may seem like a lot for a movie about sharks that attack people from inside tornadoes, it’s actually not too far removed from the ratings these SyFy original movies usually generate.
Mia Farrow, Michael Chiklis, B.J. Novak and Elizabeth Banks were among the famous faces who claimed to be watching Sharknado during its Thursday evening debut on SyFy. While others may have been quick to say the same, apparently there were a few fibbers in the Twitter crowd during the film’s highly-anticipated premiere.
Thomas Vitale, the vice president of movies for the cable network, said social media has changed how people watch these silly flicks. Although SyFy has been making movies since the mid-2000s, the arrival of Twitter and Facebook helped push these cheesy endeavors into the mainstream.
“It used to be you’d sit and watch movies with your family, and throw comments at the screen. Now with social media you can have that experience with millions of people. It adds so much,” Vitale explained to The Los Angeles Times .
Although the film’s popularity on Twitter didn’t make Sharknado a ratings behemoth, the folks at SyFy are willing to give it another shot. The network has scheduled an encore performance of Levin and Ferrante’s creature feature for next Thursday at 9 pm.
Ian Ziering , Tara Reid, and John Heard star in this touching tale of sharks inside tornados and the people who must fight them. For those who enjoy cheesy low-budget nonsense, it’s a wonderful way to completely destroy 90 minutes of your life. In case you were wondering, that’s definitely a compliment.
Do you plan to catch Sharknado when it airs again next week?