Now that SOAP has gone down and barely benefited from the net, it was the same situation with Serenity and 2 years ago with Open Water. There are probably more failures than success.The ones that can be grouped into failures would be Team America,Shaun of the Dead and Superman Returns

The only ones off the top of my head that benefited from big internet buzz would be Blair Witch Project, Hero and 28 Days Later. I cant seem to name anymore

Would you consider Fahrenheit 9/11 to be a candidate for this list, or would that have done equally well anyway given the subject matter?

The Blair Witch Project.

Which I doubt will ever be topped in terms of internet buzz leading to eventual success.

Thats very hard to say. I mean F911 had alot of coverage on Time Magazine, news media, CNN and every political circle even before it came out

I expect this to be a pretty short list. The Internet is rarely the main catalyst in propelling the B.O. That may change in the future, but right now it's rarely hit and mostly miss. It's still a great outlet for advertising, though.

Step Up

Pretty much nowadays only foreign films really benefit from the buzz as shown with Descent. It really did help Hero alot in to a lesser extent Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon because the bootleggers were praising how good the movie was

Snakes on a Plane wouldn't have made $10 million opening weekend without the internet buzz.

I'm inclined to agree, but I think it would have done fine on its own, even without MySpace's help. Dirty Dancing posted strong numbers without the Internet, though it got off to a slow start in a day where movies would stick around for awhile.

I'm sure it could've done fine numbers. But it opened way over expectations and it was all mainly due to MySpace.

That's true. Interesting how the MySpace effect seems to be focued only on select films when the site is huge and comprises members of all backgrounds.

V for Vendetta?

And Batman Begins maybe? The internet Bale mafia must have helped that some.

I dont see any movie that had its gross significantly affected in a posotive way from internet buzz. Not one. What internet buzz are we speaking of anyways? SOAP is a perfect example. It had so called massive internet buzz and bombed. Why? Because internet buzz means next to nothing. Step Up was mentioned, but Step Up had so many TV spots it literally played every comercial break on so many stations that I had the tv spot memorized a week before the movie came out. I never saw so many Tv spots in my life for a non blockbuster film and possibly even more. Blair Witch was affected by it's uniqueness more than anything else. IT was something done creatively and it had a successful run at the box office because of it.

In '99 it did benefit alot during that time, I dont know why but besides Blair Witch Project, The Phantom Menace had alot of websites sprout from the net and even Matrix benefited alot because WOM spread about how much better it was than TPM.

So you are saying the Internet is the reason for TPM and the Matrix's success?

Not so much TPM but it has quite a bit to do with the Matrix

Like mentioned: Blair Witch Project.

That will never be repeated again, internet is too fragmented nowdays to raise such a hype for one single movie. And it was the FIRST movie to use internet in such a manner, the same marketing tactics are very common nowadays.

LOTR would have done extremely well even without internet, but I'm sure the internet geekdom added a great deal of money and hype to the first film.

SOAP would have probably done a 5-7 million opening with the same mainstream marketing, but without the internet hype.

Step Up definitley got a big advantage from MySpace, I can understand success, but 20 mil opening? It helped a lot.

I also have to think that Sith got some help, geekdom galore.

Sin City as well I believe.

Napoleon Dynamite

44.5 million