A friend of mine pointed out that something remarkable happened with Ashton Kutcher’s movie “Spread”, which opened last week.

Ashton Kutcher is well known as being the king of Twitter, with more than 3 million followers:

Ashton Kutcher Twitter feed

He also has 3 million fans on Facebook:

Ashton Kutcher on Facebook

His movie Spread came out last week. Here is a family-friendly scene from the movie:

However, all that Twitter and Facebook star power did not translate into much of any traffic at theaters. According to this article…

Brad Pitt’s Fat Basterds

…Spread “made only $122,948 at 103 theaters last weekend.” And this weekend was much worse, making only $14,252 on 25 screens, for an overall total of $215,165 since it opened.

Compare that to District 9, also in its second week, with a total of $73,491,000. Per screen, District 9 is making 12 times as much as Spread.

Apparently Spread sold at the Sundance film festival for $4 million. Unless DVD sales are much better than theater traffic, the movie is unlikely to recover the investment.

It didn’t help that Spread got unkind reviews:

Review: Ashton Shoots Blanks in Gigolo Flick Spread

Still… less than 1% of his Twitter following or his Facebook following went to see the movie in its first two weeks.

Does this mean that Twitter and Facebook don’t work when it comes to promotion? Or just not for Ashton?

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