Syfy has announced it will repeat last night's orgy of bad special effects and even worse acting known as Sharknado, in response to the social media feeding frenzy it triggered.
Everyone — and by 'everyone' we mean The Reporters Who Cover Television and the suits over at Discovery Channel who probably just saw their Shark Week franchise turned into a ratings minnow by the Syfy schlockflick – was waiting Friday morning for the Nielsen ratings on the movie, in which the ecological nightmare caused by global warming triggers a freak weather system that results in a mega tornado choc-a-block with angry sharks who sail through the air attacking innocent children and blondes, and causing to be uttered such lines as "they took my grandfather, so I really hate sharks." The movie culminates in a mano-a-sharko scene, in which our hero, Ian Ziering is swallowed by a flying shark but, happily, has his chainsaw with him at the time; he saws his way out and rescues the distressed damsel who'd earlier been consumed whole by same shark.
Related: Syfy Teaser: Shark! Tornado! 'Sharknado'!!
If you did not participate in the celebrity-studded social media frenzy last night you were missing something. Because it's social media, real numbers vary wildly –so what else is new? But Syfy is going with these, which are good enough for us: Sharknado clocked 5,000 tweets a minute at its peak – TV's most social program for the evening and the NBCUni cable network's most social telecast ever. With 387,000 social mentions, 97% driven by Twitter, Sharknado bested such competitive programming as CBS's racial-slur-riddled Big Brother, and came within 2,500 tweets of HBO's Game of Thrones wedding episode.
"Given the enormous popular demand, Syfy will present a special encore presentation of Sharknado on Thursday, July 18 at 7PM (ET/PT)," the network announced proudly this morning. Among the celebrities Sharknado tweeters, Mia Farrow tweeted a photo of herself with Philip Roth with whom she said she was watching Sharknado. Maybe Roth did not appreciate the gag – anyway, the photo that had been taken of them at a dinner party days earlier, vanished at some point.
*Greg Berlanti contributed the un-original gag, "Somewhere in Hollywood there is a senior executive yelling at a junior executive for not coming up with #Sharknado first." Yeah, whatever.
*Damon Lindelof observed, "This movie is such a ripoff of The Bicycle Thief."
*Wil Wheaton warned: "You fools! You foolish fools! We should have taken global warning seriously and now there's Sharnado!"
*Naturally, some celebrities made it about themselves. "Oh Goddamn it, now I want to see it too and then I'm gonna want to quit this business…again!" contributed Michael Chiklis, for example.
*Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde, and Patton Oswalt also threw in their two cents worth. Even the American Red Cross weighed in.
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