James Cameron’s visually-thrilling Avatar started out modestly for a mega-Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, pulling in only $27 million its first day at the box office (compared to $72 million for Twilight Saga: New Moon and $68 million for Transformers). But Avatar is the “iPhone of Movies,” as Michael likes to call it (I think he’s seen it four times already, and that is just what he’ll admit to on Yammer). He is not the only one enamored with the movie, which is now nearing $400 million in worldwide box office ticket sales.
If people who are Tweeting about the movie are any judge, about 75 percent of people are saying good things about it, according to Twitter Sentiment (a site which analyzes the sentiment of Tweets). You see roughly the same numbers on TweetFeel and other sentiment analysis sites.
Twitter is the new word of mouth. Twitter Sentiment counts 111,092 positive recent Tweets with the word “avatar,” compared to 37,434 negative ones. That is a pretty large sample size, and seems to be a fairly good proxy for overall sentiment. Some of these could be Tweets about avatars in general, but if you look at the actual Tweets, they are nearly all about the movie right now. Some representative Tweets:
@steveborn1: Avatar kicked ass. Best movie I have seen this year
@roguepuppet: @katiekillian avatar is amazing. Catch it in 3d if you can
@JuLiWong: Okay i agree with everyone, AVATAR is good. AWESOME actually! 
@tubamasterj: i love avatar. why cant we live in a simple, beautiful world like pandora
@UzumundyRussuto: Avatar is way better the second time!!
@wam3studios: Avatar kicked ass………. Despite the acting
140 characters is really all you need for a movie review.
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