The Christmas holiday season has seen three very significant trailer launches for The Hobbit, The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus. All three have caused a stir online in different ways. Here we’ll take a look…

The Hobbit is certainly one of the largest responses we have seen from a film property online in the social media era. Comparing the levels of buzz upon trailer launch The Hobbit has reached almost double the levels of noise on Twitter than The Dark Knight Rises. Clearly the core audience for the Tolkien franchise have waited a long time to replenish their large appetites but we are surprised by the differential in Twitter volume from The Dark Knight Rises (which is no slouch either!). Prometheus definitely lacks the overt franchise link in the way these other properties do and it has to work a lot harder given its tenuous reported association. It’s still a strong performance no matter.

Above you can see the percentile breakdown of trailer buzz on Twitter, with The Hobbit taking a 55% share.

The surprise of The Hobbit’s Twitter domination comes from the level of blog and news output there’s been witnessed surrounding The Dark Knight Rises. This is evident when contrasting the twitter buzz to blogs, news and forums and seeing the playing field is levelled.  Prometheus too has a wide level of buzz amongst blogs, news and forums.

Theme and Character Buzz by Number of Tweets:

The Alien connection to Prometheus was made by around 1 in 5 tweeters to make it the top theme of all the trailers. Interestingly, the Space Jockey teaser generated the least of all buzz –  it is a true fanboy observation, after all.  Of the character buzz, Bane beats Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins. Relative to its overall buzz, thematically The Hobbit had fewer strong takeaways thematically.

Which director owns the franchise the most? Surprisingly for all the talk around Ridley Scott and Prometheus it is ‘Peter Jackson’s – The Hobbit’ that comes out on tops, warranting perhaps a film title change or a stronger poster mention for the New Zealander. This franchise undoubtedly belongs to Peter Jackson and imagine whether the conversation would still have been this high for him even if Guillermo Del Toro was directing!