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?