Monthly Archives: March 2012

How do they make you go to that movie again?

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Today we are going to delve deep into one of my favorite topics: Movie Marketing!

I DVR/TiVo everything but sometimes a commercial will slip through the cracks. This seems to be especially true for movies. Bad movies. I still debate whether I just notice the bad movie commercials more because they are so bad, but that is a different deep dive. For instance, I am so happy that John Carter came out in theaters so I won’t have to watch those horrible commercials anymore.

It seems there are always horrible movie commercials coming out though – Source Code, Immortals, Repo Men, and Red Tails to name just a few semi-recent ones. I was so happy on 11/12/11 because no longer would have to see Immortals ads. Then the Blu-Ray / DVD came out and I was subjected to more terribleness. Finally that dropped on 3/6 and I felt safe. Until the terrible Wrath of the Titans commercials started. It is like bad movie whack-a-mole.

In the pre and early internet days studios could drop 10-30 million on marketing and guarantee a good opening weekend for a bad movie. Now they can at best secure a mediocre weekend or slightly better if the film is in certain genres. Two things are at the top of killing the studio’s ability to trick people into watching bad movies. The first is Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. You don’t need to read reviews to see if a movie is bad or not, you just need to see the score. Studio’s also can’t buy reviews anymore to hide the truth. A lot critics were / are for sale. Some critics were even made up. Studio’s loved this as they could buy enough to fake people into thinking bad was good, or good enough. Then the sample space grew so large because so many reviews were pulled in from so many sources that it because impossible to hide the truth. Web 2.0 FTW!

The second thing that happened is texting / internet enabled phones / twitter. Within minutes of a movie starting to play the tweets fly out. People text their friends to never see a movie. This social power of the people kills all the carefully crafted marketing messages. It must be so frustrating to work in these marketing departments trying to trick people into seeing all this drivel.

I think a part of this is they market to lowest common denominator. They just assume everyone is stupid and will fall for the wiz bang effects or star. They don’t think ordinary people care / want to see good movies. Either that or studios / marketers are stupid and can’t tell what a good movie consists of. I am not talking The Artist “good movies” here, I am talking Forest Gump, LOTR, Captain America, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun,  The Social Network and last year’s Moneyball, good movies. These are well crafted stories with good effects, good characters, quality acting and they are well paced. Unlike some POS art artist crap. (The idiocy of the Academy is a whole other topic.)

This “stupid” factor, whatever side it lies on, is a key component into why studios only make sequels now or copies of other movies. They have exhausted their ability to market crap as people figure out it is crap way to quickly now. We did it to ourselves! Of course the solution to the problem is to figure out how to make better movies so they don’t have to attempt to sell crap to people, but I guess that idea hasn’t occurred to anyone, if it did, it fell on deaf ears. Either they can hire some smarter writers / producers or stop lying in their marketing, or keep kicking the can of crap down the road. (Guess which option they appear to be making.)

But let’s say you have a stinker on your hands, what do you do? Consider the case of the Three Musketeers. You remade a classic, so you had a known brand, threw in all the modern PC stuff so you hit all your demographics, made it take place in France / Europe so you would get your foreign markets to see it. You had your star power and you marketed her as the reason to see the movie. You showed ridiculous special effects that would get the “stupid” kids to come and watch. Then for some unknown reason no one watched! Your opening weekend earned $8M on 3000+ screens, coming in at 4th place. Yikes! Luckily you only spent $75 million to make this turd puppy. Overseas would allow you to recoup your loses but a picture like this will have a DVD / Blu Ray release. Obviously your original marketing plan failed. How can you re-sell this?

Consider the original commercial:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkspbi_the-three-musketeers-new-tv-commercial-launched_shortfilms

Now take a look at the new DVD commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD5P9bFfnvk

Or how about the Movie poster versus the new DVD cover –

Theater:

DVD:

Notice something is missing? I guess Mila didn’t sample so well. Sacré bleu! Joan of Arc shunned? Say it isn’t so, but she is gone. So are the over the top moments in the commercial. It’s like they are trying say the movie isn’t about giant airships shooting fire. Of course that makes the rebranding commercial very short because the movie really is about fireball shooting giant airships. But at least they are trying to trick people picking this up, like it is a whole different movie. Marketing: If the truth doesn’t work for a movie, make sure to lie better next time.

Some of us don’t forget though. We remember the failure, and more importantly the 26% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.

 

Supermodel? A blast from the past

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Has Kate Upton revived something long thought dead? In this age of Internet instant gratification and youXXX is the Supermodel back? This is a revival on a Jurassic Park scale. No one would have thought this possible but just like when Bieber used the Internets to recreate the male teenage singer, also thought dead after Michael Jackson grew up, so Kate has rebirthed the Supermodel.

A lot of people have been pretending to be Supermodels, like Tom Brady’s Yoko wife, Gisele Bundchen and the other stars of Victoria Secret lingerie parade. Most ended up as fodder tossed out of Leonardo Dicaprio’s or George Clooney’s bedroom. Heidi Klum tried to rise to the top with her Halloween shenanigans and strange marriage to Seal (now divorced.) But they never had “it”. Either too skinny, too foreign, or too lacking in synapse firing skills none of these models rose to the top. They never broke out of their Vogue monologue and hit the mainstream.

Without Supermodels we have been filling in with reality stars – Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton; actresses – Scarlett Johansson or Megan Fox and failed actresses – Lindsay Lohan. We have also absorbed the strange hybrids full of the crazy – Tila Tequila I am looking at you here. But models? No.

Even Upton’s rise to fame was all rated PG. Paris and Kim had to resort to underground sex tapes. Kate? She made a tape all right. A tape of her doing the dougie at a clippers game. This endearing 5 minutes was not the reason in and of itself of her rise, as I doubt you or me doing the same thing would result in a modeling contract, but it was a huge catalyst in an oversaturated media driven world that allowed her cream to rise.

It was assumed porn stars had destroyed the youthful almost innocence associated with Super Models. Sport Illustrated? Really? Is Maxim magazine still even published? The days of a Kristy Brinkley poster hanging in some young male’s room of yesteryear were assumed to be supplanted by a flush of porn sites running the gamut of every possible taste imaginable.

Perhaps it was this overabundance of pornography (and the freeness of it that is destroying the porn industry) that left the door open for a fresh face from Michigan via Melborne to save the popular modeling industry. Since cash left the porn industry are there even real porn stars anymore? Who is left to spend $25 dollars on one DVD? And it is not like you want Blu Ray porn.

The evidence is piling up of her Super Modelness. Consider this ad. Is it something only a Supermodel could make? (Or a reality star in her prime which we used to replaced Supermodels. Nitpicker.)

http://www.longislandpress.com/2012/02/28/kate-upton-carls-jr-commercial-video/  (SNSFW) This is quite reminiscent of Cindy Crawford hocking Pepsi products back in the 90’s, a true demonstration of her SuperModel power. We haven’t seen the like since, at least not by anyone calling themselves models.

 

Is this a flash in the pan, a Jump Jive An’ Wail, moment or do we have a real rebirth? Has she made case that she made the leap and that she is a Supermodel? The upcoming days will tell. No matter what though, it is exciting to see something so old being something so new.