“Drumline: A New Beat” Gets a Downbeat by Social Media

On August 7, 2002, the world was graced with the ultimate motion picture that really captured the essence of the typical HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and University) atmosphere.
“Drumline,” starring—Nick Cannon, Orlando Jones, and Zoe Saldana—is a two-hour long film that follows the first year of freshmen Devon Miles (Cannon), who heads to Atlanta to attend the fictitious Atlanta A&T University. The university takes pride in their Panthers marching band.
Miles is an inspiring drummer, and was personally invited by band director Dr. Lee (Jones) on scholarship to attend and march in the band. The film follows his journey as Miles discovers himself, and adjusts to the sweet HBCU flow.
Twelve years later on October 27, 2014, a sequel titled “Drumline: A New Beat,” premiered on VH1.
The sequel keeps the same spirit of its elder, by retaining the coming-of-age story line of a young aspiring teen.
The story follows Danielle (Dani) Bolton—played by Alexandra Shipp—who graduates from an all-girl private school and rebels against her parents to attend Atlanta A&T University. Bolton also joins the infamous marching band and wants to join their once-prominent drumline.
Sadly, over the years the band has lost its funding, and has become a not so great portion of the University. Sean Taylor—played by Leonard Roberts, and who was also in the first “Drumline”—comes back as the head director of bands in order to get the Marching Panthers back on the pedestal where they once stood.
While the plot sounds promising, viewers across the nation agreed that the movie could have not been so—in lack of better terms—corny.
The actors performed well, but the film definitely had some cringe-worthy corny moments that might have, but probably did, make a trending topic on Twitter.
As expected, there was a big battle of the bands that determined if the Atlanta A&T Marching Panthers were truly the “best band in the land” in their fictitious universe. Also, Nick Cannon made an appearance in the film, coming back as the prodigious Devon Miles—who is now the “P-Diddy” of the storyline.
The film had enormous potential to be a great follow up, but unfortunately the users of Twitter said otherwise. There were a total of 18 trending topics for the movie.
The hashtag #Drumline2 became a trending topic in the Twittersphere, and reviews were nothing but harsh. Many users tweeted how they would watch the film just “to make fun of how bad it is,” and the Internet has officially deemed that the film has become a “Sharknado” (Sharknado” is a TV movie that was released last year, and was so bad that Twittersphere kept it a trending topic for weeks).
The film received an average rating of 1.4 in the 18-49 demographic, with 2.4 million viewers total for the Monday night premiere (according to The Wrap). “Drumline: A New Beat” definitely could have been a great sequel to the box-office hit of a movie that came the first time around, but unfortunately the writers missed a beat with this one.