soft death

Well, it didn't take long for yesterday's Die Hard news to be questioned by more than just me, but for different reasons, and it seems that others don't have the same soft spot for the franchise that I do. (I wouldn't be surprised if Fox's marketing department pushed that story on the Hollywood Reporter in the first place.) The following is from IMDB's news page:

Suggesting that it is sometimes difficult to sort the buzz from the hype, the Hollywood Reporter was being castigated by numerous film-related websites Monday for a report suggesting that the upcoming Live Free or Die Hard could be "the sleeper hit of the season." The trade publication cited research by Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which measures Internet discussions of upcoming films, noting that the film had received nearly twice as many mentions on blogs as Spider-Man 3 and dwarfed those for Shrek the Third and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

On Monday, however, several blogs noted that much of the buzz about the June 27 release of Live Free or Die Hard was negative and that other blogs suggested that the Pirates sequel is the most anticipated movie of the summer. Movie buzz reports have been notoriously dicey this year, particularly in the recent case of Grindhouse, [which] produced a ton of Internet chatter but tanked at the box office. None of that has discouraged the Nielsen company, which announced today (Tuesday) that it is acquiring the 42 percent of BuzzMetrics that it does not already own (for a reported $100 million) and plans to combine the company with Nielsen-NetRatings. Nielsen also owns the Hollywood Reporter.