Will full-length movie reviews soon become a thing of the past?

Well, they may not. The print media will certainly feature them and so will websites. But the tech-savvy lot will certainly not be waiting for these to decide which movie to watch the next weekend.

Twitter, the popular kid on the social media block, is fast becoming the space for mini reviews and opinions. And the factors working in its favour are:

• It’s quick. Even before your movie review website can load its page, Twitter has the opinions and views screaming out at you.
• It’s short. 140 words versus half-a-page synopsis. What would you read? Critics, we hope you are listening.
• It’s spontaneous. It’s just what people think about the movie. No doctored posts, no slick lines. So, you get as honest an opinion as you would by talking to people out there.
• It’s in numbers. Why work with one critic’s view when you can know what scores, no, actually thousands of people think about it? Twitter gives you the chance to do that. Just skim through the search page and you know what a majority of tweets say.

Just to check the merit in these factors, we decided to search for ‘Avatar’ on Twitter and movie review websites. No prizes for guessing what the results were. Twitter reinforced all the above points, and in a span of twenty minutes added more than 3,000 tweets (and still counting) about the flick! Snappy, quick reviews, anyone?