“In the old days, there used to be a term, ‘buying your gross’,” said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax.

“You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth because it took time to filter out into the general audience.”

But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for moviegoers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money. — —Hollywood finds itself at the mercy of cellphone-toting teenagers (Cape Times)