A synopsis of this documentary is here:

Blackfish tells the story of Tilikum, a performing killer whale that killed several people while in captivity. Along the way, director-producer Gabriela Cowperthwaite compiles shocking footage and emotional interviews to explore the creature’s extraordinary nature, the species’ cruel treatment in captivity, the lives and losses of the trainers and the pressures brought to bear by the multi-billion dollar sea-park industry.

This emotionally wrenching, tautly structured story challenges us to consider our relationship to nature and reveals how little we humans have learned from these highly intelligent and enormously sentient fellow mammals.

Read the original article that inspired Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite here

If you missed our live Twitter Q&A with Gabriela then you can catch up on all the tweets via Storify

While in London Gabriela also gave a talk at the Apple Store – the podcast can now be downloaded from the iTunes Store

Watch a clip of Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and producer Manny Oteyza speaking to Dogwoof about the Blackfish journey…

But now read this, which is what got us on to this trail in the first place:

…Perhaps the relative lack of initial interest isn’t surprising. While Sundance plays an outsized role in creating culture, it does so more because it offers a look into what’s coming up and not because it announces what’s important in the moment. The festival, after all, is just a bunch of rich people at a ski resort in Utah.

But, given the subject matter, the positive press, and the strength of Magnolia’s marketing arm, we could have expected Blackfish to blow up when it was released in mid-July, right? Well, it didn’t. By the time the film left theaters 14 weeks later, it had grossed just over $2 million. That’s not an insignificant amount of money—good enough, even, for 77th all-time on the documentary list and fifth in 2013. (No. 1 on that list: One Direction: This Is Us, which took in $28.9 million. The lesson, as always, boy bands > killer whales.) Still, assuming an average of $10 per ticket, it means that roughly 200,000 people saw Blackfish in theaters.

Throughout the summer and early fall, Blackfish continued to swim along, essentially treading water. That changed in late October when CNN aired the movie. According to some metrics, it was the highest-rated cable news show in primetime that night, which is impressive considering how thoroughly CNN routinely gets trounced by Fox News. More to the point, Blackfish was the second-most tweeted-about show that night behind Scandal…

…On one hand, it’s amazing it took Blackfish this long to explode given that it’s a well-done film about animal cruelty, a subject Americans jump all over. On the other, it makes you realize how many steps it takes to break through the noise. Consider the path: Sundance to theaters to cable to Netflix, a chain 12 months in the making. And it’s not as though the film was ignored at each step. Blackfish garnered positive press everywhere it played, landing write-ups in major newspapers and on websites. There was an easy, relatable narrative, one that people would feel good (or self-righteous) about telling their friends. Blackfish is sharable, not in a LOL Cats way but in a “look at how caring/socially conscious I am” and “in a people really like animals” way. It’s the type of thing people put on their Facebook pages or share on their Twitter feeds. And still, it took a year to spread.

I think the bigger point here is that the thing “everybody’s talking about” isn’t really being talked about by everybody. It’s being talked about by people you know. I’m guilty of this, too. I only watched it because a close friend recommended it to me. Before I started researching this piece, I assumed it came out of nowhere. I had no idea it was shown on CNN, much less played at Sundance. It wasn’t on my radar, and then it was, and then it was everywhere.

The Blackfish phenomenon continues to grow, and it’s having at least some tangential effect. SeaWorld’s stock has dropped almost nine percent since July 19 and more than six percent in the last month.

And yet, SeaWorld will post a record-breaking profit of $1.46 billion in 2013. Well over 20 million people walked through its gates last year.

Share this. We cannot imagine why SeaWorld should be profiting in the manner they do.