'Sharknado' ratings: Lot of wind, little bite

Everybody talked about it.

But not everybody watched it.

Syfy’s original movie Sharknado delivered 1.4 million viewers Thursday night. That’s lower than many previous Syfy breakout titles, like 2010’s Sharktopus (2.5 million viewers), 2011’s Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid (2.4 million) and last year’s Piranhaconda (1.8 million). It’s even a bit below the far less buzzy Chupacabra vs. the Alamo (1.5 million), which ran earlier this year. Syfy points out that the movie skewed younger than usual (a good thing) and its 18-49 performance was up 29 percent from the channel’s movie average this year.

Still, for a movie that exploded Twitter, you’d expect a little more in the overnights. Syfy says the online feeding frenzy peaked at 5,000 tweets per minute and broke the network’s social media records. With 387,000 total tweets, the film came within 2,500 tweets of tying the Game of Thrones infamous “Red Wedding” episode.

If you missed it, Syfy will re-air Sharknado on Thursday, July 18. And if you missed our list of Syfy’s 17 most awesomely all-time bad movie titles, you can read that right now.