I just watched the documentary; Best Worst Movie. The doc takes a look at the phenomenon of the rise of, what some consider to be, the worst movie ever made to cult status 20+ years after its release. Best Worst Movie documents the actors from the film as they discover that people all over the country have mysteriously fallen in love with, what they themselves considered to be a horrible movie, that they were embarrassed to have been in. Somewhere around 2007 people started to gather in large groups to view the film and throw parties themed after Troll 2. This escalated into screenings at sold out theaters that had to turn people away because the demand was so high.

What the film doesn’t touch on is why this happened.

Why, after 20 years, did this film get resurrected and amass a huge following on the order of the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Why was a film that didn’t even go straight to DVD (VHS rather) because it was so bad it premiered on HBO late night now selling out theaters as fans gathered en mass dressed as characters from the film?

The answer is…social media. Several times through the film fans express feelings to the effect of; “I thought me and my close friends were the only ones that even had a VHS tape of Troll 2″.

What changed with social media was the ability to find other fans of Troll 2 on a scale much larger than that which you could gather in your living room. Troll 2 fans across the nation quickly started to discover in 2007 (as Facebook and Twitter started to rise) that there were people just like them all over the country.

The studios and theaters that previously had total control over what movies were going to become popular were removed from the equation as the users themselves reached into the trash and pulled Troll 2 out to celebrate the beauty and virtue in a movie that is so bad that it is in fact brilliant.

We can take away a few really good lessons from the Troll 2 case study:

Shelf life matters

At the time that Troll 2 was finished it was clear that it didn’t fit into the business models that the studios and theaters had at the time. It’s not even about the quality of the film of which there is no doubt it is quite low; many terrible movies made it to theaters in 1990 not the least of which were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Kindergarten Cop. When the vehicle of content distribution is determined by the demand of the users rather than the force and ideals of the institutions that control the content there is no telling when and how the content will be received.

This is scary for studios who are used to market research and history telling them with almost pinpoint accuracy how much a film is really worth in the marketplace. This is promising for artists who simply want to make films that move people in other ways beyond the box office. Even if the movement is laughing at the film and not with it.

Group formation works best when institutions get out of the way

The Troll 2 movement, as it were, could not have been orchestrated by a centralized institution if not for the simple reason it would be too costly. The first thing an organization has to think about is cost and efficiency and one look at Troll 2 (in Hollywood market terms) one would quickly determine that the film isn’t worth the silver oxide it is developed on let alone the money and energy it would cost to try and get thousands of people excited about it.

This is also scary for institutions that hire and pay people to organize groups. Powerful group formation is happening all around us without expert driven organizations in things like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. This is de-valuing those institution’s channels to form groups, even if just slightly, to a point where many are struggling to maintain a large enough following to maintain their infrastructure. We’re seeing this in the church in America in a big way.

These kinds of stories have me excited and if nothing else you should watch Best Worst Movie; it’s a well done documentary that will make you laugh and maybe make you shed a tear.