How do you decide which summer movies to watch? Do you choose based on word-of-mouth recommendations, online reviews, your favorite actors or box office rankings? We took a look at the summer blockbuster movie buzz using the Meltwater Buzz social media monitoring tool and we’re choosing the “best” movie to watch based on our social media analysis. Here are our findings:

To determine which movies to analyze we first turned to the box office listings. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was the clear front runner last week. However, out of the top six movies, both “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” and “Captain America: The First Avenger” looked like long-running contenders with four weeks and three weeks in the top rankings respectively.

Here are the top six box office listings for August 5-11, 2011:

Next, we plugged these movies into social media monitoring and management tool, Meltwater Buzz to measure social mentions, sentiment and demographics during the past two weeks.

Top picks by volume of mentions go to “Harry Potter,” followed by “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”

Could the movie with the most buzz be related to ticket sales? Not necessarily… “Harry Potter” buzz was significantly larger than the other movies’ buzz to gross ratio.

After looking at conversation size, we took took a look at the breakdown in sentiment. Using the Meltwater Buzz sentiment analysis tool we gathered a quick visual of the positive, neutral, and negative distribution for each movie.

“The Smurfs,” “Cowboys & Aliens,” and “Captain America” had fairly general sentiment distributions that weren’t too extraordinary. Conversely, “Harry Potter” was majority neutral (although it had the most positive conversations by volume) and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” had mixed reviews, which was intriguing.

“Harry Potter” and “Planet of the Apes” are neck and neck… which will it be? Based on the data so far, we still couldn’t pick THE Summer Blockbuster to watch, so analysis continued:

We pulled up a themes cloud for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and liked what we found. No negative keywords… plus the mention of James Franco and Tom Felton didn’t hurt. The “Harry Potter” theme cloud was much less focused. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was more unique to the movie itself rather than general movie-goer conversation.

SO that’s it, I’m calling it! THE Summer Blockbuster to see is “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” I’m off to the box office and the movie theatre snack bar… medium popcorn, no butter.