Sacha Baron Cohen with dancers at the Bruno premiere in Leicester Square

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Could Bruno be the first film to be hit by Twitter? That’s the theory going around to explain the mockumentary's spectacular opening night Friday night box office takings in the US, but equally spectacular drop-off on Saturday.

The 18-rated Bruno (R-rated in the US), which sees Sacha Baron Cohen play an outrageous, camp fashion journalist and is generally accepted to be cruder and more explicit than his previous creation Borat, may have suffered from negative tweeting, thereby causing the drop.

Movie takings are normally judged on an opening weekend - bad word-of-mouth usually doesn’t affect a film until the second weekend. In the age of instant word-of-mouth via social networks, however, it’s not so simple.

It won the weekend as a whole in the US, and along with the iPhone, Michael Jackson and "iranelection", it’s currently one of Twitter’s hot topics. But it plummeted badly after the opening day, and much of the twittering isn’t positive.

Jonathan Ross was the first to Twitter about it in the UK after attending a special advance screening: “We just got back from watching Bruno, not as funny as Borat, but funny”.

But others have followed, such as “msclarabelle”, who recently tweeted: “Watched Bruno today, hmm..not as good as I thought it would be.”

The results look impressive - Bruno came No1 in the US box office in its opening weekend with estimated ticket sales of $30.4m, while Borat opened to $26.5m in 2006. Yet Bruno opened in 2,756 theatres - three times as many as Borat, an unexpected hit at the time. In the UK it took £5m in its opening weekend - impressive, but falling well short of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s opening weekend total of £8.35m.

Comedies, especially, are expected to gain momentum over time, not lose it.

In a bid to stem the tide, the UK version of Bruno is to have a new 15-rated version, it was announced yesterday.

The new version - which is 1m 50 seconds shorter than the 18-certificate original - will see the films’ most explicit scenes cut, and open up the film to a younger audience.

It is the first time in the UK that two different versions of a film have been released at the same time.