Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy about an Austrian fashion journalist, opened to $14.2 million last Friday night. Then, the movie experienced a drastic decline in sales between Friday and Saturday, causing it to fall as much as $20 million short of some expectations for opening weekend.

Many experts speculated that negative word-of-mouth caused the sharp sales decline for Brüno, as social media sites like Twitter are enabling word-of-mouth to affect releases instantly. Time magazine said Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter, and that Friday is the new weekend when measuring box office success.

Brüno was a trending topic on Twitter throughout opening weekend. We decided to use Social Radar to analyze the sentiment of comments posted on Twitter throughout the last week.

Sentiment was overwhelmingly positive leading up to the opening, with more than 90% positive comments on July 6. But as the movie opening on July 10, the number of negative comments increased sharply, with almost 50% negative sentiment on opening weekend. Words like rotten, uncomfortable and gross appeared frequently throughout posts.

Twitter and other social media sites are empowering consumers to make more informed purchase decisions. With this new level of transparency and instant consumer reviews, product launches cannot hide behind marketing to tell the story.

As we discussed in our post about the angry United Airline customer who gained massive attention with his YouTube complaint, consumers are influencing each other directly more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before. How can companies maintain control of their brands in today’s transparent world?

Twenty years ago, when a customer had a bad experience and decided to complain, he told a few friends and that was that. Today, a customer can share a bad experience with millions of people instantly through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools. And when that customer happens to be NBC Parks and Recreation star Aziz Ansari, people listen.

Ansari went to the AMC Theater in Burbank on May 11 to see Star Trek: The IMAX Experience. He sent out a tweet that night claiming he was charged an extra $5 for a slightly bigger screen and not the full IMAX experience. Ansari then wrote a blog post asking readers to boycott fake IMAX experiences at Regal and AMC Theaters.

Slashfilm made a post on Digital IMAX supporting Ansari. CHUD and New York Magazine followed suit. Within hours, Ansari tweeted that he also had the support of Deadline Hollywood, Fark, Buzzfeed, Rotten Tomatoes, Onion AV Club, CinemaBlend, Collider and more. His story made the Digg homepage with 2435 Diggs.

Richard Gelfond, CEO of IMAX, defended IMAX against Ansari’s rant and other blogs covering the issue. Though he seemed to brush off Ansari’s comments, saying, “The overwhelming majority of comments on that guy’s blog this morning, more than 90% of them, are vehemently disagreeing with him. And consumers are confirming this with their continued purchases of tickets.” Ansari blogged a response, asking others to share their experiences online.

How much impact can one person have? Check out the trend chart below measuring online chatter. Positive sentiment around IMAX was extremely high the week leading up to Ansari’s rant, with more than 80% positive chatter. Positivity has gone down sharply to 60% over the past two days, with negativity shooting up from less than 10% to nearly 40% of IMAX posts.

We also analyzed keywords around the word IMAX over the last few days. The word fake appeared in 8% and Ansari appeared in 5% of posts. Will the chatter lead to a decrease in customers? How do you think IMAX should respond? Is your brand prepared to handle the power customers have today?

With the recent Vanity Fair tribute to Comedy’s New Legends, we thought it’d be interesting to see which member of the comedy troupe is generating the most chatter.  Seth Rogen is in just about every movie preview I’ve seen lately, so he seemed to be the obvious choice.  But veteran actor Paul Rudd has surged past even Will Ferrell in chatter to be the clear leader.  Rudd was great in I Love You, Man, but I thought Jason Segel stole the show.  Is 20 year veteran actor Paul Rudd the biggest comedy star in Hollywood?