‘Finding Dory’ Lights Twittersphere on Fire, Setting Record for Pixar

It took virtually no time at all from the nanosecond that Disney/Pixar’s hotly anticipated sequel Finding Dory was announced to the point it began trending worldwide on Twitter. Hours later, Finding Dory was holding strong on the list, as it was hours and hours later. In fact, it remained on the worldwide trend list for a whopping 15 hours non-stop before it began teetering on and off the list for a few additional hours, for a grand total of 17 hours and 15 minutes. This information comes via twend.it, a searchable index of Twitter trends since May 2010. It also reveals some additional surprises that just might shock you.

The first surprise might be that Finding Dory brought along a friend for the swim. Although it lasted only about 30 minutes — believe it or not — yesterday was the first day that Pixar trended worldwide. That got us thinking: how do Pixar’s other projects fare against its other films? Below are the trending times for each of Pixar’s film, first the longest contiguous time period followed by the total times in parentheses, number of times followed by total time in minutes:

• Toy Story – 30 minutes (5 times, 90 minutes total — mostly due to Toy Story 3)
• A Bug’s Life – never
• Toy Story 2 – 30 minutes (5 times, 90 minutes total)
• Monsters, Inc. – 90 minutes (2 times, 120 minutes total)
• The Incredibles – 60 minutes (7 times, 325 minutes total)
• Cars – never
• Ratatouille – 15 minutes
• Wall-E – 345 minutes (8 times, 585 minutes total)
• Up – never
• Toy Story 3 – 75 minutes (8 times, 255 minutes total)
• Cars 2 – never
• Brave – 15 minutes (11 times, 165 minutes total — fluctuating on/off list entire period of time)
• Monsters University – 180 minutes (10 times, 450 minutes — most of it fluctuating on day of announcement)

As you can see, none of the individual totals of each of the films above come remotely close to the one day showing (so far) of Finding Dory‘s reception worldwide. Seagull-eyed readers may note that there is one film left off the list, however, and that’s Dory‘s predecessor, Finding Nemo. The 2003 film, which pre-dates the trend database by 7 years, has in fact managed to show up on the worldwide Twitter trend list — several times:

• Finding Nemo – 705 minutes (36 times total, 4350 minutes total — often fluctuating on and off the list)

A few things that should be noted. Firstly, this is far from scientific. However, while total times may not be all-inclusive and precisely correct, the trends are certainly accurate. Where possible, multiple search times were used to yield the most accurate result (e.g., WallE, Wall-E and Wall*E were all used as terms).

It’s also worth noting that this report is based only on titles trending worldwide. By default, Twitter shows users ‘trends’ based on who they are following and who follows them, and not by geographical region which must be set in preferences.