Petrolhead sci-fi romp Mad Max: Fury Road and love story Carol are the movies currently picking up the most social media attention from the Cannes film festival, according to new research.
George Miller’s return to the dusty Australian badlands received 17,081 mentions on Twitter, forums and blogs during the first week of the festival, with Todd Haynes’s period drama about a relationship between two very different women (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) picking up 12,031 mentions.
Mad Max: Fury Road, which screened out of competition at the festival last week, has picked up rave reviews and currently boasts a 98 per cent “fresh” rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Carol has so far received a uniformly positive critical reception and is expected to be one of the frontrunners for the top prize of Palme D’Or.
Blanchett herself, who made headlines when she denied having had sexual relationships with women at a Carol press conference, came second in the chart for most mentions of a single actor, behind Lupita Nyong’o but ahead of Salma Hayek, Emma Stone and Mad Max’s Charlize Theron.
Meanwhile the topic of women in film generated more than 5,000 mentions, perhaps relating to suggestions the 2015 edition might emerge as the year of la femme. Only conversations about glitzy parties were more prevalent on social media.
The other films in the top five “most-mentioned” chart were the Gus Van Sant mystery The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts, Woody Allen drama Irrational Man, with Stone, Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s science fiction tale The Lobster, about a future in which people have to find their ideal romantic partner during a 45-day stint in a hotel or face transformation into animals. Pixar’s Inside Out, music documentary Amy, opening night feature Standing Tall, Auschwitz thriller Son of Saul and Natalie Portman’s A Tale of Love and Darkness all made the top 10.
The survey was conducted by communications firm Way to Blue, which examined 550,000 mentions about the Cannes film festival between 3 and 19 May.
“Cannes continues to reign head and shoulders above the other major festivals in terms of conversation on social networks,” said the company’s chief client officer Daniel Heale. “And the festival is still only half way through.”
