Does going viral sell cinema tickets?

A couple of years ago, Sony re-released a movie that had flopped only a few months earlier. Morbius had died at the box office in April 2022, opening to $39.1m and then dropping 74% in its second weekend. But over the following weeks, a meme playing on the film’s dreadful dialogue (’It’s Morbin’ time’) had taken off. Sony read this massive increase in engagement as demand for the movie and decided to re-release it theatrically on 3 June. It did not do well. The re-release took roughly $300,000 across 1,037 cinemas, which works out as a per-screen average of $300, or 30 tickets over three days. Yikes.And this is not an isolated experience. A number of movies have thrived and failed to capitalise on internet meme fame. And yet, some of the biggest moments for cinema in the past few years have been driven by memes and outsized online interest.So how can we separate the memes that mean money from the fads that fuel failure?I have isolated 24 movie meme moments, from Barbie to Cats, and…