The Movie Say Blog is your source for all the latest Movie Say announcements, as well as a place for movie-related discussion.

It is Saturday, and Casino Royale has been in theaters now for a little over a day. The amount of buzz that the film has managed to generate has been unprecedented in the history of MovieSay (we started calculating film buzz early last summer). In fact, Casino Royale’s current buzz rating has broken all records, topping movies like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Snakes on a Plane, The Departed and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

This is especially impressive considering that the movie has only been in the cinemas for such a short while. The pre-release buzz, of course, was more than for any other film so far measured, but even then the film has been able to generate increasingly more and more buzz in the past two days. It will be interesting to see how far it will go come Tuesday, which is when the buzz rating usually peaks for new films. (This is due to the fact that buzz rankings for new movies are based on the previous three days.)

To see the current buzz standings, see buzz rankings for movies now in theaters.

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed has unquestionably been both a critical and a commercial success. But why has the film’s buzz died down so soon, and will this have an effect on Scorsese’s chances of finally winning that Oscar that has so eluded him? Moviesay.com investigates.

A month ago, on October 6th, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed arrived to the US cinemas surrounded with buzz. Critics quickly hailed it as a masterpiece, and audiences subsequently propelled it to the top of the box-office. With Scorsese’s directorial skills and a cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga and Alec Baldwin, all this was probably not a huge surprise to anyone.

The film has since continued to do well in the box-office, and more importantly enjoys a high 93% positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, and a very good 8.5 rating at IMDb. Moreover, the film has been favourably compared to Scorsese’s earlier classics such as Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Clearly, then, the movie has been a success in both financial and artistic terms.

But what about in terms of Buzz? How much discussion has the movie actually generated? We here at moviesay.com are primarily concentrating on the amount of discussion movies generate online, and the current view there is perhaps not quite as rosy as one might imagine.

As expected, The Departed took a top spot in buzz rankings after the weekend of its release, although at one point it actually looked like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning would surface as the winner. Buzz itself topped at little over 100dB for The Departed — a rate not seen since the release of Snakes on a Plane (which went all the way up to 120dB, actually). Scorsese’s movie continued to dominate the charts also the following week, with only Grudge 2 coming close to threatening the top spot.

However, from the third weekend (October 20th) onwards things have been far more quiet for The Departed. It first, rather interestingly, lost the top spot to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, despite of the latter not making much of an impact in the box office. Similarly, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige both ranked higher in buzz than did The Departed at the end of the weekend of October 20th. Moreover, not only did Scorsese’s film lose places in the top 10 list, but also the buzz level itself came crashing down.

While it is, of course, natural that the amount of discussion a film generates drops after a few weeks following its release, in the case of The Departed this drop has been surprisingly steep. The film went in just a few days from enjoying a high 80dB rating to the low 30s and 20s that it is now holding. While buzz levels in general are quite low at the moment (see buzz rankings for movies now in theaters), it is perhaps telling that at the moment of writing The Departed only narrowly beats The Devil Wears Prada in the rankings; and Prada came out at the end of June this year.

This, of course, begs the question why this should be the case. And the answer, it would seem to me, is not extremely hard to find. It is, most probably, the three already-mentioned quality releases from October 20th: Marie Antoinette, Flags of Our Fathers and The Prestige. Each of these films, I would imagine, lured in audiences who had seen and were discussing The Departed, and with so many new films now to discuss, the amount of talk about The Departed suddenly took a plummet.

All this, of course, makes one think of the Oscars. Scorsese has, after all, been all but robbed of the honour before, and many critics are now saying that this, finally, should be his year. But if the amount of discussion remains as low as it is now, will that have an effect on the Academy voters? Will they remember The Departed come January? Of course, the promotional race for Oscar votes has not yet truly began, but unless the producers behind The Departed take some action, the current buzz levels would not seem to guarantee that Oscar for Scorsese.

There is, of course, much more to movies than awards, box-office, or even discussion. But for many it would be a shame to see Scorsese once again “lose” an Oscar.

The enormously successful opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed last weekend is, based on buzz calculations, by and large all that movie goers are talking about before this weekend. Not only has the film broken the 100 decibel line (see buzz ratings for movies now in theaters), but it has also left all the other movies far behind in the rankings: the second placed Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, which led The Departed in pre-release buzz, is currently at only 51dB.

It is more than probable that this weekend’s major openers, The Grudge 2 and the Robin Williams starring Man of the Year will not be able to threaten the top spot. Indeed, it may well be until the opening of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on October 20th that The Departed will remain the most talked about current movie.

In order to see the buzz rankings for movies now in theaters, see here. For more about Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, see IMDb.

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed has rather expectedly taken the number one spot in the buzz rankings for movies now in theaters, but the release has also ignated quite some discussion of the director’s earlier masterpiece, Goodfellas. The film now finds itself second in the buzz rankings for classic films, only second to Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

The reason why The Little Mermaid has so suddenly taken over the number one ranking in the classics list is Disney’s new Platinum Edition double DVD release, which has sold over four million copies in North America in its first week on release.

The Little Mermaid has also boosted the discussion of other Disney classics, with the modern classics top ten now including three Disney movies: The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

[Update: Two days later, The Departed shot to the top of the list, while Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning dropped considerably.]

Somewhat surprisingly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginnings is currently more discussed online than is the upcoming Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Departed. Both films are set to open in the US on October the 6th, and can hence be found in Movie Say’s buzz rankings for upcoming movies.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginnings is a prequel to the 2004 horror thriller Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which in itself was a remake of the controversial 1974 film of the same name. The new film is set four years before the events in the remake took place. The prequel is currently traded at H$55.41 at the Hollywood Stock Exchange, suggesting that the movie is expected to take in more than 55 million dollars in its first four weeks of release. And at least the fans of the original should be flocking to see it: a user at IMDb has described the film as “Full-On Chainsaw. Lots of gore. Very little cheese.”

Meanwhile, the crime drama The Departed, set in South Boston where the Massachusetts State Police is battling the Irish Mob, is a world away from Texas Chainsaw. Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Departed is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller and clocks in at two hours and thirty minutes, plus comes with a star-filled cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, and Alec Baldwin. The film also marks Scorsese’s third subsequent feature film starring DiCaprio in its leading role.

In the end, the difference in buzz between Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and The Departed is small — only two Movie Say decibels at the time of writing.