Did Twitter Kill "Bruno"?

Maybe. With Twitter and a cellphone anyone can give an instant review of anything they're doing, and it appears a lot of people who wasted money on the movie "Bruno" did their fellow Twitizens a favor and panned the movie, and that kept a lot of others from wasting their money:

Comic prankster Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up to his surprise 2006 hit "Borat" looked like a surefire hit at the box office, a low-budget, high-ceiling treat for its studio, Universal.

But a funny thing happened on the way to box-office glory: The public didn't seem willing to play along, and bad word-of-mouth about the filthy flick sent its box office into a tailspin.

"Bruno" opened July 10 to huge numbers, pulling in $14.4 million for the day. Studio executives saw those numbers and rejoiced: Visions of a $45 million, $50 million, maybe even $55 million weekend danced through their heads. This was a bona fide hit, a movie that would recoup its budget and much of its advertising costs in the first weekend alone!

Then came the fall.

On Saturday, the box-office take of "Bruno" fell to $8.8 million, a huge Friday-to-Saturday drop of almost 40 percent. Sunday saw another dip as the film took in $7.5 million. At the end of the weekend, "Bruno" had taken in $30.6 million, a decent haul, certainly (slightly more than "Borat," though "Bruno" showed on twice as many screens), but nowhere near the phenomenal numbers that Universal and Mr. Baron Cohen must have thought were coming their way after Friday's huge take.

Why the huge drop-off? What happened between Friday evening and Saturday evening?

For a hint of what went wrong, take a quick look at the CinemaScore numbers. CinemaScore polls audiences right after they've seen a movie to get a quick sense of the mood in the theater after a movie ends. "Bruno" scored a C.

While C is average at the schoolhouse, it stands for death at the multiplex. To create a frame of reference, consider that the vast majority of major summer releases score in the A to B range with audiences no matter how bad or good the film is: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" received a B+ and "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" received a B; "Star Trek" scored an A, while "Up" scored an A+.

CinemaScore isn't the only place where one can examine snap judgments and the initial word-of-mouth on a movie. Twitter lit up with anti-"Bruno" sentiment late Friday night. Twitterer jasoneskin's lament was typical: "Just to update everyone, Bruno is STILL awful. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Has absolutely no cinematic or cultural value," he tweeted Friday evening.

One other tweet is instructive. "Bruno was absolutely awful. Don't see it, seriously. Showing a dick and expecting me to laugh is not happening," Dkamys wrote later that night. His reaction was typical, and box-office observers think that's one of the reasons the audience fell so steeply midweekend: People simply weren't prepared for the raunchy assault Mr. Baron Cohen sent their way.

First of all, anyone who went to see "Bruno" and was surprised by what they saw has got to be an idiot. What did they expect - War and Peace?

Twitter is a fun little tool. I use it quite often when I'm out somewhere to make comments on what I'm seeing or doing, and I've done some reviews along the way. I haven't gone searching on Twitter for information about something I wanted to see, but it might be a smart thing to do.