Did Twitter take down "Brüno"?

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest ambush comedy film Brüno took the top spot at the box office this weekend but the film is already being talked about as something of a disappointment. Why? On Friday it pulled in a promising $14.4 million and, based on typical moviegoing trends, Brüno was expected to pull in $40-50 million by the end of the weekend.

Instead, Brüno imploded by Saturday, pulling an estimated $30.4 million for the weekend.

It used to be that if a movie were going to bomb, the movie studio still had a good chance to make money during the opening weekend. After all, if audiences didn't like it, they probably wouldn't get the chance to tell their friends and co-workers until the following Monday.

That's changed quite a bit lately thanks to technology. First, unhappy movie goers would send text messages to their friends, warning them to see something else. Now, one factor in what might have done Brüno in are people similarly expressing their disappointment over Twitter.

Over the weekend both Bruno and Brüno were trending topics on the site. And digging through the tweets broadcast to the world on Friday, reviews were very mixed, including plenty of negative ones.

A lot of the negative reviews were pretty straightforward, like the ones below:

I am amused by reddjohnathan's icon. Apparently, he didn't hate the movie enough to find an icon from something he likes.

If you're seeing a trend in some of these pans, you're not alone:

Looking up the tweets of people who talked about walking out of Brüno became such a popular spectator sport over the weekend that about one in every twenty tweets with "Bruno" and "walked out" were about how one should seek out tweets about people walking out of Brüno.

Sadly, the negative Brüno tweets included a fair number of homophobic reactions from folks who couldn't handle how gay Sacha Baron Cohen's over-the-top gay caricature was so very, very over-the-top gay.

I can totally understand OneishaPooh's point of view, though. After seeing How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, I vowed never to watch another film about straight people until I realized that heterosexual lives are so varied and can be used to tell all kinds of stories, including ones that don't invoke yelling and eye rolls.

I don't think I'll be seeing Brüno in theaters out of fear that the audience will leave me contemplating how bad my high school years could have been. But for those of you who have seen Brüno, what did you think? What was the audience like and were there walk-outs? Does anyone who saw Borat have an excuse to be grossed out by Brüno's antics?