Are you sitting at your desk at work today? Or sitting in front of your TV watching the sequel to Sharknado? More importantly, once the numbers are crunched does the answer to that question actually matter?
Sharknado 2: The Second One will air in Australia on Thursday, July 31, from 11.30am AEST, only minutes behind the United States.
As sequels go, the title alone suggests it's every bit as banal and ridiculous as the first one. Bad acting, bad effects lots of sharks and lots of references to the original Sharknado. What more could you ask for?
Here's an up-front declaration: Sharknado 2 is already a hit, and it hasn't even aired. Why? Because when it comes to this particular small-screen B-cinema franchise, it's difficult to see where the marketing stops and the film begins.
The awfully cheap follow up to an already awfully cheap first chapter - we're talking $US2 million budget, tops - marched into the annual pop culture festival Comic-Con with all the confidence and class of a Star Wars chapter.
Seem incredible? Not really. Comic-Con loves a genre, and with the sequel screening barely a few days after it launched there, the studio has assured it will smoulder from the heat of Comic-Con's warming buzz.
The sequel's plot is writ large from the Handbook of B-Sequels: shark-killing Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) heads home to New York with wife April Wexler (Tara Reid). They pal up with Judah Friedlander, Mark McGrath and Vivica A. Fox (the character names don't really matter) when bad weather turns the city into shark fin soup.
True, it's not as bad as The Birds II: Land's End, and it makes the all-singing, all-dancing high school epic Grease 2 look like Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods. But if you're hoping to avoid Sharknado 2: The Second One, you are gonna need a certain kind of earmuff. The thick kind.
It seems almost absurd that only 1.4 million people watched the original in the US. Fewer still in Australia. And yet it cranked out tweets on the social media platform Twitter faster than splitting cells. In truth, it's real life came later, as the wave of noise triggered by Twitter turned into actual marketing.
Sharknado is now a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Its triumph as a sequel, and as another Twitter "event" seems assured, even if it now comes in a more orchestrated form, driven by marketing department employees rather than the spontaneous discovery of something so awful it simply had to be shared.
The sequel dials up the storm. And dials up the body count. It also dials up the sharks. You could be forgiven for thinking you'd misread the title: this isn't Sharknado 2, it's Sharknado Squared.
"The whole thing is over the top; we have gone bigger and better in all regards," screenwriter Thunder Levin said. (And yes, he's real, though his pre-Sharknado body of work is best summed up by his 2008 masterpiece, Mutant Vampire Zombies from the Hood.)
Sharknado 2 is even bulging at the seams with celebrity cameos: Today's Matt Lauer and Al Roker, Kelly Osbourne, Andy Dick, Kelly Ripa, Perez Hilton and New York's iconic Naked Cowboy among them. Where press-hungry celebrities go, noise is bound to follow.
And yet its success also teaches the powerful lesson that as simple, and cheap, as it might seem, capturing lightning in a bottle isn't the easy process social media Twitterstorms make it out to be.
Other B-movies cranked out by SyFy failed to create the same cultural impact, from the absurd Sharktopus (about a man-eating shark/octopus) to the unmemorable Piranhaconda (about a man-eating anaconda, with a piranha's head.) Unlike Sharknado, they have joined Rage of the Yeti and Loch Ness Terror on the dust heap of B-movies.
Only one thing is certain: bad things come in threes. Which means a third Sharknado isn't so much a gamble, as a dead certainty.
* Sharknado 2: The Second One airs Thursday, July 31 at 11.30am on Syfy on Foxtel and Fetch TV. It will be repeated at 9.30pm.
