It would have been easy enough to say one should wait "one day" or "one week. Let's game this out with a few particulars. Let's say an episode of Westworld aired on a Sunday at 9 p. Generously presuming it ended at 10 p. However, co-workers who failed to catch up on their Westworld homework on Monday evening should be unwilling to complain about midweek spoilers in the break room. In the case of movies, let's say that you went to a midnight showing of Avengers: Endgame on Thursday, April Ten days would put you at midnight, May 5.
Coincidentally or perhaps not , that day window more or less coincides with the guidelines that Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo proposed. Aware that Endgame would be a cultural event, the Russo brothers were in effect asking the same question as the British respondents, and came up with the same answer.
One of the things this survey doesn't tell us is how this proposed spoiler treaty effects shows that arrive on streaming services as complete seasons. It also depends on how much time has elapsed. And yet we all still feel we know a spoiler when we see it, and we are outraged when we feel that someone else has ruined our fun.
But before we go further down this road, I need to issue another spoiler alert for most of the links embedded in this piece. All right, here goes: On Monday afternoon, I wrote a piece about a particular plot twist on Game of Thrones , a big one, and Vulture tweeted a link to the article that contained a summary of said twist, plus an image illustrating it. Although I did not phrase the tweet or choose the picture that went with it, I defended both, rather halfheartedly, when readers complained; then I had second thoughts and asked an editor to change the original wording of the tweet, and Vulture sent out another tweet but with the same picture.
And there were complaints. We ended up leaving the second tweet up. Was this also an error in judgment? Yes, probably — but the whole thing opened up a can of spoiler worms, which seems to happen at least once a week in the age of social media. But how long? The first round of complaints about that Vulture tweet came 18 hours after the episode had aired in every North American time zone.
I continued to get complaints on Tuesday, a full 48 hours after it aired. What courtesies should be extended here? In what way, exactly, are media outlets or other viewers on social media failing to be considerate, and to whom?
This can only mean one thing: it is time to definitively locate the point when spoiling a film or TV show is OK. Some nefarious movie insider will post spoilers — sometimes the entire plot — of a film to Reddit, and these secrets are then disseminated online and into newspapers. Before you know it, everyone knows what happens in Infinity War and nobody has any fun watching it, all thanks to a mouthy berk on the internet. You should also be careful if you are tweeting while a TV show is actually being broadcast, because these days the live audience only represents a fraction of total viewers.
Tweeting gifs of Daenerys dying before the final episode of Game of Thrones has finished is, and will always be, a dick move. It was a genius move: at once raising the profile of the film, making fans feel complicit in its success and encouraging everyone to cram into cinemas during opening weekend.
Increasingly, this feels like the best way to go. If creators can be proactive in asking viewers to keep a secret, it has a much better chance of working. That said, if they had asked for longer than a three-day silence, the embargo would have crumbled.
0コメント